In 1909, a commission appointed by the Greek government reported that a third of the villages of Greece should have their names changed, often because of their non-Greek origin. In other instances, names were changed from a contemporary name of Greek origin to the ancient Greek name. Some village names were formed from a Greek root word with a foreign suffix or vice versa. Most of the name changes took place in areas populated by ethnic Greeks in which a strata of foreign or divergent toponyms had accumulated over the centuries. However, in some parts of northern Greece, the population was not Greek-speaking, and many of the former toponyms had reflected the diverse ethnic and linguistic origins of their inhabitants.