Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian

The goal of this article is to analyse the role of urban place names (‘urbanonyms’) with dialectal origins in the domain of Italian toponomastics. The article offers a gazetteer-based study from which a list of dialectal generic terms is extracted and compiled. From this list, a detailed geographic distributional analysis of these terms is offered, and the dialectal origins of terms are assessed. A questionnaire study is subsequently presented that analyses to what degree Italian speakers may interpret these terms as being dialectal in origin, and to an extent unique to the places they classify. The article concludes by discussing how these findings can inform our understanding of place names, their linguistic properties and their possible dialectal origins.