Vēsturiskie ciemu nosaukumi Piejūras reģionālajā parkā: kuršu un kursenieku pēdas Klaipēdas apkārtnē

The paper deals with the analysis of the toponyms of the historical Klaipėda region (Ger. Memelland), the northern part of former East Prussia. Research material comes from historical and cartographic sources of various periods. The accessibility of these sources enables marked expansion of the data that was used by the initiators of this theme in the middle of the twentieth century. A fairly small seaside territory (2,735 ha in the mainland), in which the concept of the regional park is directly related to the protection of cultural heritage, was selected for research. Methods of diachronic and comparative linguistics, as well as of geolinguistics, are combined with analysis of historical and genealogical data. Special attention is paid to the traces of fifteenth-to-eighteenth-century migration from Courland in the onomastics in the Klaipėda region. The problem of regional lexical identification, investigation of the chronology of the documentation of names, and the search for specific linguistic features addressed in the paper allow raising the hypotheses of the origin and the interaction of languages. The actualisation of historical and obsolete names for the needs of the Baltic, historical, and cultural studies is approached as an important issue. In the sixteenth century, the northern part of Prussia was a zone of intensive contacts of the Baltic languages. The personal names recorded here at that time point to undisputed links between the dialects of Courland and north-western Lithuanians. Now it is difficult to say which part of the toponyms has reached us from the old Curonians and which toponyms immigrated from Courland – not only due to the hypothetical nature of the reconstructed system of close languages, but also because analysis is made complicated by varying orthography in German characters. In the seventeenth century and later, the expansion of Latvian onomastics in the Klaipėda region decreased, but even then, there would appear names the etymology of which is more transparent in Latvian and not Lithuanian. The influence of Curonian and neo-Curonian (the Kursenieku language) is stronger in the seaside territories of fishermen and in the locations where fishermen became assimilated in the farmers’ community. However, the names of the villages situated at some distance from the sea are more frequently related to Lithuanian anthroponyms. In the northern part of the Klaipėda region, German toponyms were rare exceptions even during the period of intensive germanization. Although in the early twentieth century, the origin of the official oikonyms used in the Lithuanian and German environment often differed, the absolute majority of German oikonyms are of Baltic origin. Lituanization of the names of villages was a natural result of the residents’ assimilation process. In the process of the reconstruction of historical toponyms, it is possible to form a reserve list of names, part of which could be brought back for ‘the second life’ by giving these names to streets, parts of the regional park, hotels, and other objects.