Personal naming and society: a comparative study of disparate communities

Abstract

There are multifarious connections between personal names and the societies in which they are bestowed and used.This paper reports on a project which investigated personal naming systems (both official and unofficial) in several present-day communities in Scotland with differing social and linguistic features.The project investigated practices in five communities which range from: rural to urban, multilingual to monolingual, close-knit to loose-knit, indigenous to immigrant.The data were collected through extensive semistructured interviews in each community alongside a degree of participant-observation.The project had a socioonomastic focus: to examine links between personal names and society.A comparative approach allows for conclusions broader than simply how official and unofficial names were used over generations within one community -it produces a spread of data spanning space and (micro-)culture.This permits tentative conclusions regarding the effect of social factors such as social structure and cultural and linguistic contact.

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