-ach, -ingen, -zell

A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in the endings of German town and village names.

I picked the most interesting suffixes from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortsname and cross-referenced them with a list of place names from geonames.

Darker colors indicate a higher proportion of place names with the respective suffix in a geographic cell. Hover over a cell for a while to see a tooltip with the place names.

Please note: My approach is not 100% scientific, as I only match the letters at the end of the string, not actual syllables. So, Kirchbach matches -ach. #justsaying

Yet, it's a dataset I always found interesting to explore; plus, this quick experiment gave me the opportunity to play a bit with a few new tools and libraries I wanted to learn more about.

Find the code at: http://github.com/moritzstefaner/ach-ingen-zell

And, here's a few screenshots. Feel free to use them when you report on the project, but please link back to this page.

Moritz Stefaner, 2016

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