RESUME
When we speak of Western Bulgarian Outlands, we encompass the areas currently or formerly populated by ethnic Bulgarians that have remained outside of Bulgaria's present borders. After The Treaty of Neuilly from 1919, most of the settlements in the former Tsaribrod District remained outside the state.
The subject of the present study will be local (place and water) names or microtoponyms from 34 settlements currently located in neighboring Serbia, which formerly formed the Tsaribrod administrative region and are now distributed between different Serb districts. The great majority of place names were excerpted from written sources. The performed etymological and onomastic analysis of 3000 microtoponyms from the Tsaribrod region could be summarized as follows: ancient name layers; the linguistic singularities of the toponyms are characteristic of a much earlier archaic stage of the development of our language and this attests to their antiquity. The study of the origin and significance of the researched microtoponyms from the Tsaribrod and Pirot regions has led me to the conclusion that the local names follow the characteristics of contemporary Bulgarian naming systems (toponymyc and anthroponymyc).
The majority of the microtoponyms presented here have preserved lexis or anthroponyms in their root for which there are exact parallels in Bulgarian toponymy, both in the neighboring areas to the east and in more remote places with an ancient Bulgarian population. The toponymyc data basically confirms the unity of the Bulgarian language in spite of all the later influences and the often aggressive politics of assimilation imposed by neighboring states.
Anna Choleva-Dimitrova
