Hispanic toponymy of Western Sahara: Stratigraphic and typological analysis

The research undertaken was aimed at analysing place names of Spanish origin in the Western Sahara context. From Western Sahara’s place names extracted from GeoNames electronic system via the continuous sampling method a corpus for the analysis was built. 132 toponymic units of Spanish origin or with Spanish allusions were analysed. The au-thors classified Spanish elements of Western Sahara’s toponyms and categorised Hispanic toponymic patterns. The conclusion is that the originality of Western Sahara’s place names is manifested in the Hispanic layer, which is a reflection of the country’s contradictory colonial past, toponymic classes that are unusual for the embodiment of Spanish place names, in basic topoformants that are different from Hispanic geonaming traditions in other Spanish-speaking parts of the world. © Irina A. Martynenko, Olga S. Chesnokova 2022.