Place names that designate German settlers in medieval Hungary

Abstract

We have no written Hungarian sources from the time preceding the conquest of Hungary. Written Latin culture in Hungary emerged with the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Carpathian Basin in 1000 (with the coronation of St. Stephen) and the conversion of its inhabitants to Christianity. The early Latin (less frequently Greek) written sources created at this time (charters, chronicles, etc.) contain Hungarian words and expressions only sporadically; these were usually proper names designating places. Due to their early appearance and low number, however, they have proven to be truly valuable in historical linguistics studies. Historical studies also rely greatly on the conclusions drawn from these sources when exploring the early history of Hungarians. Such studies attempt to describe the ethnic and population history of the contemporary Carpathian Basin by taking account of the results of historical linguistics concerning the semantic and etymological features of names and their origin. In this respect, the settlement names rooted in ethnonyms play a key role, as they also shed light on relations between Hungarians and other peoples. In this paper, I examine those settlement names that may refer to settlers designated by the ethnonym német in medieval Hungarian.