Stasjonsnavn og navn på lokomotiv:Ofotbanen i Nordland og Nesttun–Osbanen i Hordaland

Abstract

This article is a socio-onomastic contribution to Norwegian lan-guage history. We investigate which names were given to the stopson two new railway lines during the last decades of the 19th cen-tury: Ofotbanen in Nordland and Nesttun–Osbanen in Hordaland.We investigate whether naming practices were different in railwaydevelopment in the north and southwest, in the mountains andfarmland, and in a multilingual versus a monolingual environment.One question reagarding the naming practices is whether thenames given to stops and stations were names of natural features,farm names or names of man-made features, and whether it is pos-sible to find out who had the power to decide which names shouldbe used. We also look briefly at the etymology of the various names.The article ends with a look at the locomotives and their names