The Elusive Endonym

Abstract

The term ‘exonym’ was coined in 1957 by Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, to denote a place name used in a non-native language. ‘Endonym’ was later coined analogously as its counterpart, meaning the native name for a place. An example exonym would be the English word Germany, referring to the country whose inhabitants know it as its endonym Deutschland. These terms are useful to cartographers and also the United Nations, since it publishes documents in its six official languages, referring to places all over the world. The topic of endonyms and exonyms would seem to fall into the linguistics domain of onomastics and/or languages in contact, but it is difficult to find a linguistics textbook that mentions the concept. This paper will attempt to more fully explain the subject in the light of the facts of linguistics. It will correct common assumptions that stem from the distinction between proper and common nouns, from the international use of the Roman alphabet, from the dominance of the English language, and from ignorance of the well-established and well-understood processes of language evolution. It will conclude that exonyms are equivalent to loanword borrowings, and that there are no true endonyms.