This atlas maps literal name endings. Similar spellings do not always share an origin, and the short descriptions are guides rather than individual etymologies.
Two ways of counting
Settlements: named OSM cities, towns, villages and hamlets. Isolated dwellings are optional. Suburbs, neighbourhoods and uninhabited localities are excluded. OSM IDs are deduplicated across extracts; coverage and classifications vary.
Municipalities: Eurostat GISCO LAU 2024 names and boundaries. Each dot is an interior representative point of the administrative area, which can differ from the village centre. Municipal mergers change the picture. Uninhabited LAUs are excluded from the dots. Populated special administrative areas can remain in this layer.
The area
Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, South Tyrol, German-speaking Switzerland and Belgium, plus optional Luxembourg. South Tyrol includes the whole province, including its Italian- and Ladin-speaking places. Belgium includes its nine German-speaking municipalities. Swiss municipalities are selected using the BFS 2022 language classification, joined by ID to 2024 boundaries. Four 2023 mergers inherit the unanimous language of their predecessors; lakes and shared uninhabited areas are excluded. This is a statistical language-region definition.
Reading the endings
Variants are grouped in families: for example -tal / -thal and -wil / -wiler / -weiler. Geographic qualifiers such as “am Albis” are ignored. Bilingual and compound names are checked in parts; the longest suffix wins, with one family per dot. South Tyrol municipalities use the German component of the bilingual GISCO name. OSM settlements retain their source spelling.
The optional ending labels mark the geographic centre of each matching family in the current dataset and region filters. Labels are moved apart when needed; a leader line links a displaced label to its centre.
Real terrain
The relief is calculated from Mapzen Terrarium elevation tiles, with multidirectional hillshade and modest vertical exaggeration. The locally stored Mercator raster follows zoom and pan and is included in map exports. Its resolution suits a regional overview; close zooms soften the relief.
The stream-name family groups southern / High German -bach with northern / Low German -bek, -beck, -beke. These are spelling matches; individual origins may differ.
Sources & snapshots
Mixed OSM dates: Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia use January 2021 extracts returned by the download service. The remaining extracts are from October–November 2026. Coverage differences can affect counts.
Counts describe these datasets and filters, not a complete historical inventory of place names.
DataTimes.at