Social Context of the Slavic-German Language Contact : North-eastern Bavaria and the Eger Region in the Early Middle Ages
Abstract
The toponymic systems preserved in areas of language contact present a socially unbalanced outlook, with names selected from various language domains, personal networks and repertoires of members of different social ranks. The goal of the paper is to decode this systém and determine the period, the relative succession and the social ranks in which the Slavic or German language have been represented, and the language domains and personal networks in which they have been used.
The paper is divided into two basic parts. The first part summarises our theoretical and methodological framework based on the models of contemporary onomastics and sociolinguistics.
The second part contains analysis, comparison and interpretation of individual categories of proper names such as hydronyms and settlement names in north-eastern Bavaria and in the Eger region.