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The aim of the present paper is to describe the geographic diffusion of the family name Pfaff in Germany, starting from the telephone directory of 2005 and retracing the historic linguistic phenomena that led to the formation of this name. Pfaff (mhd. phaffe, md. paffe, nd. pape, southern German Pfaffe “priest” or “churchman”) is explained both as an agnomen and as the name of a profession. Our map represents an addition to the maps that have already appeared in dtv – Atlas Namenkunde (1999), Duden-Familiennamen (2005) and Deutscher Familiennamenatlas (2011), for it additionally and thoroughly renders not? only the geographic diffusion of the family name Pfaff in Germany but also in Transylvania, where the name also exists. [this surname also exists in Transylvania]. The type Pfaff (5056 telephone addresses) is spread all over Germany, but we notice two areas of high frequency: one, according to our expectations, in the southern part of the Benrath Line and on the right of the Germersheim Line, but also on the left of the latter, especially in the rectangle Koblenz – Kassel – Hof – Frankfurt and also in south-western Germany (in Schwarzwald –The Black Forest). The northern version Pape, approximately twice more frequent than Pfaff(e), did not adapt to standard German, due to the negative connotations of the appellative Pfaffe, Pfaffen, which appeared at the same time as the Church Reform in the 16th century. In some places in Transylvania, the surname Pfaff was replaced with the version Prediger. The appellative Pfaffe and the family name Pfaff (in the Saxon language – the Romanian “limba sãseascã”: faf, pfaf ) contributed to the formation of different rural toponyms in Transylvania. The surname Pfaff is spread not only in the German linguistic space, but also in areas where ethnic Germans live (France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Romania, USA, Canada, Argentina). In Romania, there are very few Pfaff surnames in telephone books for the 2008-2009 period, due to the massive migration of the German ethnics to Germany after 1990.
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