Abstract
The article aims at demonstrating that toponymy in colonial and postcolonial settings is a promising area for linguistically-informed research. On the basis of evidence drawn from erstwhile colonies of France (with a focus on Senegal) and Spain (with a focus on the Western Sahara) it is shown that, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, the processes of naming and renaming places are conditioned by an intricate network of mostly social forces. The interaction of these forces may yield different results so that colonial toponyms are not necessarily doomed to disappear from the maps when decolonization sets in. The authors argue strongly for paying more attention to colonial and postcolonial toponymy especially from a comparative perspective.
Acknowledgments
This publication is made possible with funding from the Future Concept of the University of Bremen in the framework of the Initiative for Excellence by the German federal and state governments. The authors are grateful to the two editors for the kind invitation to contribute to this volume. Laura Morgenthaler deserves an extra thank-you for providing us with invaluable reading matter on the history of the former Spanish colonies in Africa. Marina Wienberg lent us a helping hand in practical matters. Some of the ideas put forward in this article have been presented first on occasion of a joined talk delivered at the University of Cologne on 26 June 2014. We like to express our gratitude to Anne Storch and our discussants in the Cologne audience for their thought-provoking comments on our hypotheses. Mohamed Touré has enlightened us kindly about the toponymic preferences of Wolof native speakers. We are also indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments upon the draft version of this article. It is understood that the responsibility of the contents and the format of this article is exclusively ours.
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