Das Thüringer Flurnamenportal – ein Werkstattbericht

Abstract

Field names are used to designate uninhabited areas in a local district such as forests, fields, meadows, mountains, rivers and lakes and all the other natural or human-influenced features of a landscape that people use to orient themselves there. As such, they are a part of people’s regional identity and serve to establish their identification with the surrounding cultural landscape; they are linguistic relics and provide important historical testimony ofa region. Field names in  Thuringia have been collected and evaluated in more than 100 years of research conducted there. Since 2019 the holdings of the Thuringian Archive of Field Names have begun to be digitized, and a Thuringian Field Names Portal is being developed. The article is a report on work in progress and presents the Thuringian approach to the digital processing of the region’s field name heritage and to field name research based on citizen science.