Exonyms as expressions of intercultural relations

Exonyms in the sense of place names used not by the local community, but by other communities and differing in writing from endonyms are frequently regarded as typical for monolingual, monocultural situations, where communication occurs between people speaking the same language. They are sometimes even seen as expressing territorial claims or political nostalgia, thus as indicating politically expansive, hostile or at least insensitive attitudes – incompatible with multiculturalism. The paper will hint at another aspect of exonyms, i.e. the aspect of facilitating intercultural relations by making it easier to pronounce and use names for geographical features outside a community’s own territory, to remember them, to develop a rather precise mental map of foreign territories and thus to incorporate an otherwise ‘strange world’ into a community’s own cultural sphere, to avoid unnecessary alienation. The paper will also show that consequently the corpus of exonyms used by a certain community reflects this community’s external cultural, economic and political relations.