Other divisions · Language
Slavic place names
19.8% of the villages and towns in the former East have names with typical Slavic endings such as -itz, -ow or -in, against 0.6% in the former West. All 11 districts where such names make up 30% or more lie in the East.
| Zone | Districts | People | Share | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% or more Share of settlement names with a Slavic ending | 11 | 1.9 m | 2.2% | 32,518 km² |
| 10–30% | 40 | 10.4 m | 12.5% | 51,421 km² |
| Under 10% | 350 | 71.2 m | 85.3% | 273,649 km² |
Place names ending in -itz and -ow date from the early and high Middle Ages. The Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography maps them as typical of the former Slavic settlement area: apart from a few scattered names they form one closed zone from East Holstein through the Wendland and the Altmark to East Thuringia and the Upper Palatinate. Its western edge, which settlement historians call the Elbe–Saale line, formed from about the 8th century as a language border between Slavic speakers to the east and Germanic speakers to the west, though it was a fringe in which Sorbian and Frankish villages stood side by side rather than a sharp line.
Counting all 46,824 settlements in the official BKG gazetteer, 2,459 of 12,394 in the five eastern states carry a Slavic ending such as -itz, -ow or -in (19.8%), but only 222 of 34,418 in the ten western states (0.6%), 31 times fewer. All 11 districts where such names make up 30% or more are in the East, led by Vorpommern-Greifswald (47.4%), Mecklenburgische Seenplatte (42.2%) and Rostock district (42.2%).
But the map follows the Elbe–Saale line more than the 1949–1990 border. Only 3 western districts reach 10% (Lüchow-Dannenberg, 13.2%, Hof district, 10.8% and Bayreuth, 10.5%), where the old Slavic area reached west of the later border. In the East, 28 of 75 districts stay below 10%: 15 of Thuringia's 22, most of them west of the Saale, 7 in Saxony-Anhalt (among them Magdeburg, Börde, Harz and Mansfeld-Südharz, west of the Elbe and Saale) and 4 in Saxony along the Erzgebirge. Next door, in the Vogtland (10.0%), the Leibniz Institute notes a cluster of German -grün names from the late clearance period of the 12th to 14th centuries.
The pattern holds for the strict definition the Leibniz Institute uses (only -itz and -ow): 16.0% of settlements in the East against 0.5% in the West. Slavic speech itself has almost disappeared from Germany; only the Sorbs of Upper and Lower Lusatia, in Saxony and Brandenburg, have kept their West Slavic languages.
How we drew the line
We took every settlement (object type "Ortslage": towns, villages and hamlets; 46,824 names) in the official gazetteer Geographische Namen 1:250 000 (GN250) of the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, as of 31.12.2024, and assigned each to its district by the official regional key that GN250 gives for it. After removing qualifiers such as "(Müritz)", "/Sa." or "b. Kulmbach" and skipping saints' names ("Sankt …"), a name counts as Slavic-ending if it ends in -itz (including -witz and -nitz) or -ow, the two endings the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography uses for the former Slavic settlement area, or in -itzsch/-itsch, -schütz or -in (not after a vowel, which leaves out German -stein, -hain or -lein), endings that reference works also trace to Slavic suffixes. The value is the share of a district's settlements with such a name; zones are bands of under 10%, 10–30% and 30% or more. -zig, -gast and -ick are not counted because in western Germany they also end many names that are not Slavic (e.g. Sinzig, Merzig, Dangast, Bardowick).
- Endings are a signal, not proof: an automatic search cannot tell a Slavic -in or -itz from a German name that happens to end the same way (e.g. Schlitz in Hesse), and it misses Slavic names that were Germanised (e.g. -ow to -au, Leipzig, Wolgast, Lusatian -en). Each name would need its documented early forms to be sure.
- GN250 is a 1:250 000 gazetteer, so it lists larger villages and towns rather than every hamlet; the share depends a little on how many small places a district's survey office recorded.
- City districts have few settlements in GN250 (16 districts have fewer than 10), so their shares rest on small numbers.
- A Slavic name says where Slavic speakers named a place in the Middle Ages, not who lives there today or who built the village; many villages with Slavic names were refounded or settled by Germans from the 12th century.