Post- och järnvägsstationers namn i Götaland 1860-1940 : Namngivning i spänningsfältet mellan allmänna och enskilda intressen : name-giving and the tension between public and private interests

Sammanfattning: Up to the middle of the 19th century the distribution of mail, public as well as private, was, to a large extent, a duty imposed on farmers. Demands from farmers to be relieved of this duty resulted in the Government giving the Post Office authority to set up post offices of a new, relatively simple kind (poststationer, or sub-post offices). The majority of these sub-post offices were set up in places served by the railways, and most of them were combined with the railway station, in which case the mail would be dealt with by railway station staff. Between the end of 1860 and the end of 1919, the number of main and sub-post offices in Sweden increased from around 200 to 3,639, of which 3,383 (93 per cent) were sub-post offices. As a result of this rapid expansion, there were often collisions of names, and the postal and railway authorities were forced to introduce naming principles. The parishes, villages, farms etc. which lent their names to sub-post offices are referred to in the thesis as name sources.The findings of the study can be summed up as follows: (1) Place-names which became sub-post office names acquired a new denotation, while retaining their old one. (2) Parish names, the names of villages established around parish churches and the names of large estates and industrial communities became more important. (3) Regional features of the place-name stock, associated with the economic structure of the regions concerned, came to be accentuated. (4) Names of water features and artefacts could become settlement names. (5) Names of already established communications facilities could influence the naming of new sub-post offices. (6) New place-names were created to a certain extent, but primarily this was done by adding elements to existing names according to established patterns. Very few completely new names were coined. (7) The naming principles applied could result in the names of well-known places being passed by, while those of insignificant places were elevated to the status of sub-post office names. (8) The expansion of the rail network and the network of sub-post offices, which occurred largely before industrialization and urbanization began in earnest in Sweden, helped, in spite of the changes mentioned under 7 above, to preserve and consolidate important components of the existing agrarian nomenclature.