title: Why is the North Sea West of Us?:Principles behind naming of the Seas
abstract: This article focuses on the motivations behind sea-naming, by means of examples from Europe but also elsewhere. Why do certain sea names become dominant while others retract into local forms or simply die out? The article takes us back in time to the early days of map-making and, indeed, earlier. Occurrences of sea names such as the North Sea are examined and analysed to see how they spread from an original one-language form to exist in multiple languages, and analyses them from a linguistic, ge
journal: Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen)