On September 17 and 18, 2018, an international conference on the topic of name geography will take place in the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. The reason for this is that the German Family Name Atlas (DFA) was finished in July 2017 with the publication of the sixth volume. The aim of the project was to record the most common surnames in Germany in their spatial distribution on the basis of grammatical and lexical questions. Thus, the atlas could not only show the distinctive regional distribution of many family names, but it also proves to be a catalyst and model for further family name geographical and lexicographic projects in Germany and abroad. Examples are the “Digital Surname Dictionary of Germany”, the “Surname Atlas of Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Hesse”, the “Luxembourg Family Name Atlas” or the “Luxembourgish family name dictionary”. In addition, it turns out that the geographical evaluation also leads to new insights in other branches of onomastics, as investigations, for example, on call, settlement, guest house or street names show.
Possible topics are:
· Evaluations with material from the DFA, interpretation of DFA maps, including the inclusion of adjacent disciplines.
· Presentation of work in progress, completed or planned name geographical projects (family names and other name types) at home and abroad.
· Geographical studies in areas that have not been researched so far, such as business names.
· Lectures from neighboring disciplines such as dialectology, geography, digital humanities, computational linguistics, computer science, which contribute to the further development of the name geography (compulsory is graphic material).
· Methodical possibilities, technical solutions, visualization of name data.
The deadline for abstract submission is March 31, 2018. Abstracts can be sent by e-mail to namengeographie@adwmainz.de. More information can be found here.
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A PhD studentship is being offered by the University of Glasgow for students who are interested in researching connections between place names and geology. The project, called Place-Names on the Rocks, intends to test the proposition that place-names reflect, and might even be used to predict, aspects of underlying geology in the landscape. This will be achieved by subjecting Scottish place-name data to a rigorous examination underpinned by geological expertise. Fieldwork will contextualise place-name data in a geological framework to strengthen the candidate’s research linking these two features. The project proposes that the link between place-names and geology is not confined to only one language or area, and so the research will encompass different parts of Scotland, and involve investigating names originally coined in Gaelic, Scots and Old Norse. The deadline for formal applications is: 12noon, Friday 12 January 2018. 
The 
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