All corners of Bahia

identity and cultural marks in Bahia toponymy

Abstract

Among linguistic study fields, Onomastics – branch of Lexicology that deals with personal names (anthroponyms) and place names (toponyms) – constitutes a source of language study in relation to the cultural heritage of a people. Apart from linguistic influences, a toponym receives, in its formation, external interferences from geographical, historical, political, religious and social conditions. In this perspective, a toponymic study can help to identify the relationship between the lexicon of a language and the culture of the people who speaks it. Thus, understanding the language as a manifestation of culture and highlighting its identity and historical character, it is analyzed, through a  lexicological work, the names of 169 Bahia municipalities contained in XX and XXI volumes of the Enciclopédia dos Municípios Brasileiros (EMB), published by Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) on July 2^nd 1958, in order to show that toponyms can preserve traces of identity and culture and they can contribute to the preservation of a place memory. For the analysis of the corpus, it was used the taxonomy proposed by Dick (1990) for a toponymic work, and the data collected were registered into lexicographic-toponymic files. The developed analysis indicates a relationship between the place names and the cultural environment in which they are inserted and it allows to check the aspects involving language, culture and identity of the examined regions.