Colonial place-names in Italian East Africa (AOI) (with additional data from Tripoli). The linguistic heritage of colonial practice

This article deals with Italian colonial toponymy in the former African colonies of East Africa. The focus is on the naming practices of Italian colonizers as evidenced by the toponymical traces of the colonial period. Both pure exonymic macrotoponyms and microtoponyms (mostly urbanonyms or odonyms) are taken into account. The objective is to illustrate empirically that there were two different phases during the fascist regime of Mussolini: the first begins with his regime in 1922, and the second, shorter than the previous one, begins with the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 and ends with the loss of colonies during the Second World War (1941–42). Both phases manifested themselves in the domain of colonial naming practices. The second phase specifically shows the emergence of the colonial toponyms which are formally and semantically distinguishable to some extent both from those of the 1882–1922 Liberal period and those of the first fascist phase. The general aim is to identify characteristic traits connected to Italian practices of naming places in the context of colonialism as compared to those of other European and non-European colonizers.