DFG Project ‘Digital Book of Vorpommern Field Names’
From 2016 to 2020, the Pomeranian Dictionary worked on the "Digital Book of Vorpommern Field Names" project, which was funded by the German Research Foundation over a period of four years.
The first sub-objective of the project was to record and document the field names in Vorpommern as stored in writing as fully as possible from a wide collection of printed and unprinted sources. Katharina Oelze was the project's research assistant, who was supervised by PD Dr. Matthias Vollmer. She was supported in her work by student assistant Friederike Burmann. The majority of the field names are of Low German origin, but older Slavic names and mixed names were also collected. Field names are the names generally given by the local population to all types of agricultural land (e.g. fields, pastures, meadows, forests). In the past, these names represented the precise orientation and localisation framework for the rural living and working environment. Because the naming of a piece of land can be traced back to a specific naming motif, field names provide information about past ownership, settlement structures, flora and fauna, the use of land, etc. Field names are therefore not only a rich source of material for linguistics, but also for e.g. historians, archaeologists, folklorists and geographers.
The second sub-objective of the project is the comprehensive linguistic analysis of the findings.
This was realised by compiling a lexicon of field names as a fundamental guide for the region of Vorpommern, which was published by Peter Lang at the beginning of 2025 (Matthias Vollmer / Katharina Oelze: Flurnamen in Vorpommern. Ein Namenlexikon).
In over 500 articles, the lexicon describes the most important factors in the creation of names of fields in the investigated region, explains their lexical significance, and the most common ways in which field names were formed.
