Community microtoponymy: Proposals to read an oral corpus from Marene (Piedmont, Italy).

Investigating an oral microtoponymy set from a socio-onomastic point of view presents us with the challenge of how to read the variation these data disclose. Starting from the toponyms collected during field research in Marene (Piedmont, Italy), this paper intends to outline an analysis method that allows us to reconstruct the toponym formation process and observe the nodes from which the different paths branch out, causing this variation. The scheme that we follow here takes as its basis the proper name theory of the Italian linguist A. Prosdocimi, that involves splitting the name formation process into three levels: physical, cultural and linguistic “individuation”. Some specific examples taken from the corpus collected in Marene – places mentioned just by one informant; places named by most of the informants and their cultural and linguistic interpretation – are presented in order to show the functionality and versatility of this scheme in analysing variation within a community’s toponymic repertoire.