Taajamaa

[Pursuivant]

Taajama is... Wikipedia to the rescue... Aha, no wonder, its a "nordic thing"

Urban area is a common English translation of the Swedish term tätort. The official term in English, used by Statistics Sweden, is however locality. They could be compared with census-designated places in the United States.

A tätort in Sweden has a minimum of 200 inhabitants and may be a city, town or larger village.[1] But it is a purely statistical concept, not defined by any municipal or county boundaries.[2][3] Urban areas referred to as cities or towns (Swedish: stad) for statistical purposes have a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants.[4] In 2010 there was 1,956 urban areas in Sweden, covering 85 per cent of the Swedish population.

The Finnish wiki elaborates a bit more. Also Estonians use the same.

Don't think "urban area" quite cuts it in some places

[AldenG]

I believe I've seen the term "populated area" in the context of where certain activities are prohibited or permitted.

[Rekkari]

Wiktionary:

1.A (densely) populated community, a population centre.

But what about a single word English translation?

Google Translate

conurbation

and then back to Wiktionary:

1.a continuous aggregation of built-up urban communities created as a result of urban sprawl

And if you really want the nitty gritty:

A Dictionary of Geography distinguishes between uninuclear conurbations (conurbations which have developed around one urban area) and polynuclear conurbations (conurbations which have developed from the aggregation of several urban areas).

So I'd say that 'taajama' translates from Finnish quite precisely as 'conurbation' in English.

[Rosamunda]

We also use the term "built-up areas" in British English especially when talking about things like traffic.
It is the term employed by the UK Highway Code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built-up_a ... hway_Code)
and more generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built-up_area

[AldenG]

North America also uses "densely populated area" a lot, though that is a good deal more populated than tätort (a concept familiar to me), which doesn't have to be very populated, and thus presumably taajama (a translation I hadn't heard before). Also "sparsely populated area," which appears to be haja-asutusalue and probably comes to Finnish from glesbygd. Sweden is nothing if not thorough about inventing methods and words for people-processing. Umeå University had a dining hall (Universum) whose foremost brag was that it could push people through the cafeteria lines faster than any other facility in the Nordic countries. I believe the figure was something like 60 per minute on average.

"Populated area" is something you see in ordinances about discharge of firearms, for instance.

The pieces of "conurbation" (another word I didn't know) make me think specifically of metroplexes like the "BosWash," Dallas-Forth Worth, Minneapolis-St Paul, whatever they call Seattle and neighboring cities, and many other things known as "greater metropolitan areas" -- though it seems it would also apply to quite small towns that have begun to overlap.

[Rosamunda]

Yes, originally a conurbation was where two reasonably large cities merged together and included the areas in between. For example, in Finland Tampere, Hervanta etc could be considered a conurbation. The term is more loosely employed nowadays but I still wouldn't use it for smaller towns and villages.
A built-up area, OTOH, is an umbrella term for any area that has houses etc rather than open fields (or forest).

[AldenG]

It's getting to be a bad habit going back on the "real computer" (=HDTV or higher resolution) to fix posts originally made on my mobile.

So anyway, what would be a cluster of data points on a graph? My first thought was "tiheämä," but apparently only one other person in the whole Interverse has seen fit to concoct that word for any purpose; and that was about vegetation. Ryhmittymä? And can taajama be any kind of clustering other than population or building?

[Pursuivant]

"Tihentymä" maybe, asutustihentymä. "Taajaan asuttu", "taaja asutus" makes sense as taajama... I think the option would have been taaja-asutus... Tihentymä or tiheä doesn't quite cut it... Imagine coming to town and you saw a "dense" sign So no, I think its a word made up for that exact purpose.