There's actually another village called Fugging in Lower Austria, i assume the name was chosen to keep it phonetically close to Fucking but within the linguistic boundaries of "common" village names.

Also, a "Fock" is a pig in Austrian and Bavarian dialects, so "Focking" would be indicative of "pigs place" or "where the pigs are from", which hardly sounds like a desirable name for ones village.

Swindon ("Pig Hill", a large town of about 180,000 people in Southwest England) is just one of many places named after pigs- why wouldn't you name your village after its main agricultural product?

My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".

Pigs as dirty is an outdated, mostly religious based, meme.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-joy-of-pigs-smart-clean-...

Regardless, there are many idiomatic phrases that treat pigs as undesirable, e.g., "you filthy pig", "I'm sweating like a pig", "you've made a right pig's ear of that" etc.

While your campaign to restore the dignity of the pig is admirable, I'm not sure it's going to catch on

I try. Maybe I might make one person think differently. Thanks for noticing.

Ok but the town wasn't named after pigs so why change it now?

Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal.

Only if a human puts it there.

As a German speaker, their choice seems quite natural, because it won't alter the modern pronunciation a lot. I'd even guess that the new spelling might represent a typical Austrian pronunciation with a soft "k" sound more accurately.

Is Austrian like Swiss German where "gg" is "k"? If so the pronunciation might have not/barely changed for locals, but is no longer funny for English speakers.

Locals don't speak a phonetically hard 'k' in the middle when refering to that village. If you heard them say the name, you'd not be sure whether to write it with gg or ck in the middle. (NB: I live in a village essentially next to Fucking)

This. I live in southern Germany (swabia) and many village names kind of have a 'standard german' spelling and a local pronunciation. I feel like Fugging might just be a change that reflects a more austrian pronunciation in the spelling.

> Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.

All the time, they would have had people scraping away some paint turning the "o" into a "u"...