Endonym and exonym


An endonym or autonym is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their place of origin, or their language.
An exonym or xenonym is a foreign established, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place,
language, or dialect, meaning that it is used primarily outside the particular place inhabited by the group or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words, or from non-systematic attempts at transcribing into a different writing system.
For instance, is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonyms Germany and in English and Italian, respectively, and in Spanish and French, respectively, in Polish, and and in Finnish and Estonian, respectively.

Naming and etymology

The terms autonym, endonym, exonym and xenonym are formed by adding specific prefixes to the Greek root word ὄνομα , from Proto-Indo-European.
The prefixes added to these terms are also derived from Greek:
  • endonym: ἔνδον ;
  • exonym: ἔξω ;
  • autonym: αὐτός ; and
  • xenonym: ξένος .
The terms autonym and xenonym also have different applications, thus leaving endonym and exonym as the preferred forms.
Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, first used the term exonym in his work The Rendering of Geographical Names.

Typology

s and exonyms can be divided in three main categories:
  • endonyms and exonyms of place names,
  • endonyms and exonyms of human names, including names of ethnic groups, localised populations, and individuals,
  • endonyms and exonyms of language names.

    Endonyms and exonyms of toponyms

As it pertains to geographical features, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines:
  • Endonym: "Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located."
  • Exonym: "Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located."
For example, India, China, Egypt, and Germany are the English-language exonyms corresponding to the endonyms Bhārat, Zhōngguó, Masr, and names of Germany, respectively. There are also typonyms of specific features, for example hydronyms for bodies of water.

Endonyms and exonyms of glossonyms

In the case of endonyms and exonyms of language names, Chinese, ''German, and Dutch, for example, are English-language exonyms for the languages that are endonymously known as Zhōngwén, Deutsch, and Nederlands'', respectively.

Exonyms in relation to endonyms

By their relation to endonyms, all exonyms can be divided into three main categories:
Sometimes, a place name may be unable to use many of the letters when transliterated into an exonym because of the corresponding language's lack of common sounds. Māori, having only one liquid consonant, is an example of this.

Cognate exonyms

, for example, is known by the cognate exonyms:
An example of a translated exonym is the name for the Netherlands used, respectively, in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Irish, Portuguese, Romanian and Czech, all of which mean "Low Countries". However, the endonym Nederland is singular, while all the aforementioned translations except Irish and Czech are plural.

Native and borrowed exonyms

Exonyms can also be divided into native and borrowed, e.g., from a third language. For example, the Slovene exonyms Dunaj and Benetke are native, but the Avar name of Paris, Париж is borrowed from Russian Париж, which comes from Polish Paryż, which comes from Italian Parigi.
A substantial proportion of English-language exonyms for places in continental Europe are borrowed from French; for example:
A lot of exonyms for places are borrowed but adopted to the target languages conventions, such as keyboard layout. For example diacritical marks such as two dots above are stripped when English-language media write about them. Transliterations take place if another alphabet is used originally. Prononciations are also often adopted.

Typical development of exonyms

Many exonyms result from adaptations of an endonym into another language, mediated by differences in phonetics, while others may result from translation of the endonym, or as a reflection of the specific relationship an outsider group has with a local place or geographical feature.
According to James Matisoff, who introduced the term autonym into linguistics, exonyms can also arise from the "egocentric" tendency of in-groups to identify themselves with "mankind in general", producing an endonym that out groups would not use, while another source is the human tendency towards neighbours to "be pejorative rather than complimentary, especially where there is a real or fancied difference in cultural level between the ingroup and the outgroup." For example, Matisoff notes, Khang "an opprobrious term indicating mixed race or parentage" is the Palaung name for Jingpo people and the Jingpo name for Chin people; both the Jingpo and Burmese use the Chinese word yeren as the name for Lisu people.
As exonyms develop for places of significance for speakers of the language of the exonym, consequently, many European capitals have English exonyms, for example:
In contrast, historically less-prominent capitals such as Ljubljana and Zagreb do not have English exonyms, but do have exonyms in languages spoken nearby, e.g., German: Laibach and Agram ; Italian: Lubiana and Zagabria. Madrid, Berlin, Oslo, and Amsterdam, with identical names in most major European languages, are exceptions.
Some European cities might be considered partial exceptions, in that whilst the spelling is the same across languages, the pronunciation can differ. For example, the city of Paris is spelled the same way in French and English, but the French pronunciation is different from the English pronunciation .
For places considered to be of lesser significance, attempts to reproduce local names have been made in English since the time of the Crusades. Livorno, for instance, was Leghorn because it was an Italian port essential to English merchants and, by the 18th century, to the British Navy; not far away, Rapallo, a minor port on the same sea, never received an exonym.
In earlier times, the name of the first tribe or village encountered became the exonym for the whole people beyond. Thus, the Romans used the tribal names Graecus and Germanus, the Russians used the village name of Chechen, medieval Europeans took the tribal name Tatar as emblematic for the whole Mongolic confederation, and the Magyar invaders were equated with the 500-years-earlier Hunnish invaders in the same territory, and were called Hungarians.
The Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire applied the word "Walha" to foreigners they encountered and this evolved in West Germanic languages as a generic name for speakers of Celtic and later Romance languages; thence:
  • Wallachia, the historic name of Romania inhabited by the Vlachs
  • The Slavic term Vlah for "Romanian", dialectally "Italian, Latin"; additionally Vlaška means "Wallachia" in Serbo-Croatian and "Italian woman" in Czech
  • Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium
  • Cornwall and Wales, the Celtic-speaking regions located west of the Anglo-Saxon-dominated England
  • Wallis, a mostly French-speaking canton in Switzerland
  • Welschland, the German name for the French-speaking Switzerland
  • the Polish and Hungarian names for Italy, Italy and Italy respectively

    Usage

In avoiding exonyms

During the late 20th century, the use of exonyms sometimes became controversial. Groups often prefer that outsiders avoid exonyms where they have come to be used in a pejorative way. For example, Romani people often prefer that term over exonyms such as Gypsy or the French term bohemianism. People may also avoid exonyms for reasons of historical sensitivity, as in the case of German names for Polish and Czech places that, at one time, had been ethnically or politically German or Russian names for non-Russian locations that regained their local name.
In recent years, geographers have sought to reduce the use of exonyms to avoid this kind of problem. For example, it is now common for Spanish speakers to refer to the Turkish capital as Ankara rather than use the Spanish exonym Angora. Another example, it is now common for Italian speakers to refer to some African states as Mauritius and Seychelles rather than use the Italian exonyms Maurizio and Seicelle. According to the United Nations Statistics Division:
Time has, however, shown that initial ambitious attempts to rapidly decrease the number of exonyms were over-optimistic and not possible to realise in an intended way. The reason would appear to be that many exonyms have become common words in a language and can be seen as part of the language's cultural heritage.