Centre for Scottish & Celtic Studies

Brittnee Leysen is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow in Celtic and Gaelic, focusing on place-names and 19th century migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Previously, Brittnee obtained her BSci degree in Anthropology, and MLitt in Celtic Studies. Currently, Brittnee convenes the University of Glasgow’s Onomastics reading group.

The paper I gave at the American Name Society Conference 2020 was on, ‘Cognitive Toponymy: Establishing a Sense of Place in the Central Otago Goldfields’. Inspired by the Cognitive Toponymy Research Network, I define Cognitive Toponymy as how people think about, and name, the landscape. In my research, I consider the namescape of the Central Otago goldfields, located in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island. I utilise Laura Kostanski’s Theory of Place Attachment/Toponymic Attachment to look at how human interaction and experience of a ‘sense’ of place, overlapped with human interaction and experience naming the physical landscape. In cognitive toponymy, we can also assume that human interaction both influences the creation of toponyms, as well as how humans perceive the landscape as a result of the ‘sense of place’ they get from existing toponyms. This sense of place and the emotional connections humans have to the landscape as well as place-names themselves can be labelled as ‘place attachment’.

 

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First published: 21 April 2021