Toponymic motivations: The act of naming popular districts in the Angolan periphery

Abstract

This article focuses on toponyms, which is a sub-field of onomastics, and aims to explore the nature and motivations behind giving non-official names to settlement districts located in the outskirts of Angola. Such districts developed in the post-independence period, particularly between 1976 and 2016. It is the first work of an on-going project and it explores a corpus of 34 districts, selected from 10 provinces of Angola, with a focus in its capital, Luanda. The study was carried out in a sub documented area in Angola and shows how naming is characterized in the post-independence period. The results reveal that names materialize from spontaneous contexts and reflect a precarious experience, from a social and economic point of view. This leads us to believe that the civil war, which lasted 27 years, has greatly influenced the naming of districts in the outskirts of Angola, as their names seem to have been chosen based on the motivations of their founders.