Swedish Place-name Legislation: Application, Evaluation, Revision

• Autores: Staffan Nyström
• Localización: Onoma: Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, ISSN 0078-463X, Nº. 47, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Names and law), págs. 119-136
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Since July 2000 a paragraph on �good place-name practice� has been included in the Swedish Heritage Conservation Act. It is referred to as a due consideration provision, which gives priority to established names, but also demands respect for correct linguistic forms, including those applying to the minority languages of Sami and Finnish. The full text of the paragraph is given in the article and four examples are presented to show how it can be applied generally and in specific cases. Six years after the place-name paragraph took effect � in 2006 � an attempt was made to evaluate how it had been received by the 290 local municipalities of Sweden. A questionnaire was distributed with questions such as: �Are you familiar with the paragraph in the law dealing with place names?�, �Has the new legal amendment had any effect on the working procedures, the organization or the attitudes in your municipality when it comes to place- names?� etc. In 2011 the same questionnaire � with one added question � was distributed again. The results of both the evaluations are presented in short and compared in the article. Finally, a small but important amendment to the paragraph on good placename practice is underway and is commented on in the article, namely the inclusion of place-names in Meänkieli side by side with those in Sami and Finnish. Meänkieli is one of the officially recognized minority languages in Sweden, a variant of Finnish spoken in the north.