Placenames of indigenous origin in Acre-Brazil

• Published in: Domínios de lingu@gem Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 299 - 321
• Main Authors: Costa, Rozangela de Melo Martins da, De Sousa, Alexandre Melo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Linguísticos 04.02.2021
• Subjects: acre; indigenous toponymy; toponymic atlas of the brazilian western amazon; toponymic motivation
• ISSN: 1980-5799; 1980-5799
• DOI: 10.14393/DL46-v15n2a2021-2

Toponymy, a discipline that studies place names, is one of the branches of Onomastics: science responsible for the study of proper names. This study aims to trace a profile of toponyms of indigenous origin in the rural area of Acre, analyzing toponymic motivations related to fauna, flora and hydrography in Acrean geographic features.  This corpus – collected in the maps provided by IBGE, with a scale of 1: 250,000 and 1:1,000,000 – was based on the theoretical-methodological proposal by Dick (1990, 1992), especially regarding the taxonomic model, composed of 27 taxa, subdivided into physical and cultural categories, and as to the catalogue and storage of toponymic database (DICK, 2004). The results revealed that, out of 392 toponyms, 74% are names linked to physical and geographic characteristics, 20% concerning cultural factors and 6% were unclassified. The research showed that toponymic motivation is mainly based on flora, fauna and hydrography predominantly from Tupi language origin.