A toponymic study on districts names of São Luís/MA

A place name testifies the value, the importance and the particularities which have influenced the denominator when it comes to naming it. Based on these arguments, this analysis consists of the study of the current 81 Maranhão’s capital districts names through the origin and historical development perspective. Our aim is to determine the toponymic motivation of 81 place names proving which of these two taxonomic categories, physics or antropocultural, with their taxes, is more recurrent in the toponymic creation in São Luís city, divided into four synchronic periods. As a result of the documental and field research, the corpus consists of 81 official place names currently used by the city hall of São Luís and the chosen methodology is based on the approach of Dick (1990, 1994) and Curvelo (2009) which recommends 31 toponymic classifications. In addition to this Typological Method, the Toponymic questionnaire and the lexical-toponymic forms were used to register the collected data of the four toponymic areas: Center, Center-Rio Bacanga, Center-Rio Anil and Center- Caminho Grande. At the end of the research, we observed that the Microtoponymy of 81 district names of São Luis is composed of 57 toponyms of antropocultural nature, 20 of physical nature and 04 of mixed nature, demonstrating that the motivation of the locative was primarily antropocultural and not physical. Over the course of 404 years of São Luis history, the districts nominations is due to many factors: cultural, social, geographic, historical, economic, political and housing.