ICOS Terminology Group

See the terminology publications page for outputs from this project.

  • Chair: Artur Gałkowski (Poland) – artur.galkowski@uni.lodz.pl
  • Terhi Ainiala (Finland)
  • Fatemeh Akbari (Austria)
  • Urszula Bijak (Poland)
  • Andrea Bölcskei (Hungary)
  • Donatella Bremer (Italy)
  • Enzo Caffarelli (Italy)
  • Joan Tort Donada (Spain)
  • Tamás Farkas (Hungary)
  • Halszka Górny (Poland)
  • Milan Harvalík (Czech Republic)
  • Peter Jordan (Austria)
  • Aleh Kopach (Belarus)
  • Julia Kuhn (Germany)
  • Regina Kvašytė (Lithuania)
  • Tiina Laansalu (Estonia)
  • André Lapierre (Canada)
  • Unni Leino (Finland)
  • Sanda Rapa (Latvia)
  • Yaroslav Redkva (Ukraine)
  • Márcia Sipavicius Seide (Brazil)
  • Iveta Valentová (Slovakia)
  • Natalia Vasileva (Russia)
  • Mats Wahlberg (Sweden)
  • Wojciech Włoskowicz (Poland)
  • Christian Zschieschang (Germany)

The Terminology Group of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS) is a working body of ICOS, which has been formally active since 1990 for consecutive 3-year Council terms. It is chaired and coordinated by a member of the ICOS Board (successively Vibeke Dalberg – Denmark, Rudolf Šrámek – Czech Republic, Milan Harvalík – Czech Republic, currently Artur Gałkowski – Poland). The members of the Group are representatives of different countries and languages selected from among the ICOS members. The members of the Group represent at the same time many well-known national and international onomastic schools and other organisations, whose main scientific and applied interest is onomastics.

The aim of the Group is to establish and internationally standardise scientific terminology in the field of onomastics as a humanistic discipline dealing with proper names in its basic branches, i.e. onomastics theory, anthroponomastics, toponomastics and chrematonomastics. The onomastic terminology constitutes an essential and indispensable element of unification at the level of onomastic research carried out by researchers representing various disciplines,
including linguistics, literary studies, geography, cartography, history, marketing etc. The resulting terminology builds a specific interdisciplinary meta-onomastic language. So far the Terminology Group of ICOS has prepared and published on its website a list of onomastic key terms. In the first stage of the work, the list was created in the congress languages English, German and French. In the second stage, this undertaking was supplemented by lists of key terms in nearly 20 other languages (here).

Database of Onomastic Terminology ONOMTERM

ICOS’ key onomastic terminology is also the result of consultation with other global organisations that use and refer to onomastics, e.g. toponomastics within the scope of the UNGEGN (United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names). Currently, the ICOS list of key terms is being expanded to include new terminological units, important for the developing branches of onomastics and its use in other areas of science and culture. The group is also joining an extensive international project on onomastic terminology ONOMTERM, whose leading centre is the Onomastic Research Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

For more on the Group’s terminological challenges, see e.g.:

  • Onomastic terminology: an international survey / Terminologia onomastica: un’inchiesta internazionale, edited by Milan Harvalík – Enzo Caffarelli (edited by), “Rivista Italiana di Onomastica” XIII/1, 2007, 181- 220.
  • Slovak and ICOS onomastic terminologies, by Iveta Valentová, “Onoma” 55, 2020, 289 – 310.
  • Development of International Works on Onomastic Terminology: Review of Slavic Approaches, by Artur Gałkowski, Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska / sectio Philologiae, 37(1), 2019, 61 – 81.
  • The terminological work of UNGEGN and ICOS – a presentation and a comparison, by Staffan Nyström, Proceedings of the XXIV ICOS International Congress of Onomastic Sciences. Annex. Section 1] / [ed] Juan Tort i Donada & Monserrat Montagut i Montagut, 2014, 52 – 57.
  • Slavic toponomastic terminology vs. ICOS & UNGEGN terminology, by Dunja Brozović-Rončević, The Twentieth Session of the East Central and South-East Europe Division of the UNGEGN, Zagreb, 2011.