Our paper focuses on two key issues: it addresses the theoretical questions related to the genesis and changes of toponyms and discusses issues concerning the typological description of place names. In both cases, we also touch upon areas that we believe to provide opportunities for international cooperation and thus for the comparative analysis of the toponymic system of different languages. As for the toponym genesis and toponym changes, we primarily focus on the universal motives of name-giving, the role of name competence and name patterns, the socio-onomastic aspects of name-giving as well as the relations between toponyms and culture. In the second part of our paper, we introduce the approach and theoretical framework used in our work on the system and history of Hungarian toponyms. First, we need to introduce those principles which we wish to follow in the analysis of toponyms. In the description of toponyms the functional approach is applied as we believe that functional linguistics may serve as the most suitable theoretical framework for toponomastics (and onomastics in general).