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List of German exonyms for places in the Czech Republic
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German speaking regions in Austria before 1918.
The names of many places in the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia) have evolved during their history. The article concerns primarily the towns and villages, but bilingual names for mountains, rivers etc. are also listed when they are known. Places are sorted alphabetically according to their German names.
Many of the German names are now exonyms, but used to be endonyms commonly used by the local German population, who had been invited into the less-populated regions as colonists by Bohemian and Moravian nobles in the Middle Ages and who had lived in many of these places until shortly after World War II.
Historical perspective[edit]
Until 1866, the only official language of the Empire of Austria administration was German. Some place names were merely "Germanized" versions of the original Czech/Slavic names, as seen e.g. from their etymology.
Sudeten example of German name Freiwaldau transcribed Fryvaldov and further renamed Jesenik to remove any German link
The compromise of 1867 marked a recognition of the need for bilingualism in areas where an important portion of the population used another language; the procedure was imposed by official instructions in 1871.[1]
In the 3 provinces which now are part of the Czech Republic, the languages used were (around 1900):[2]
- Bohemia: Czech (63%), German (37%)
- Moravia: Czech (70%), German (29%)
- Austrian Silesia: Czech (22%), German (48%), Polish (30%).
It may thus be more appropriate to state that German names were all official endonyms.