Italianness in Polish street names and rural toponymic microsystems

The study focuses on street names in Polish cities, towns and villages, in particular it examines Italian references within contemporary Polish odonymy. The author has performed a semantic and structural analysis of 554 units, applying the classification proposed by K. Handke. The results from the study of name usage show that there are 0,20% of proper names referring to Italianness on Polish streets, and 2% of them are motivated. Most names derive from other proper names. The most common are street names taking origin from anthroponyms (44%) – commemorate figures that are deemed to be important to the local community (saints, artists, musicians, patriots, explorers). They are followed by names derived from place names (20% – cities, 11% – other toponyms). 7% of corpus are names derived from ethnonyms. On the other hand, there are street names not subject to the transonimisation process and they represent 12% of corpus. The paper also provides a list of the most frequent street names and information about geographical differentiation of urban and rural street names, as well as a short presentation of female street namesakes.