Personal Names in Lunda Cultural Milieu

Abstract

The topic of names has drawn the attention of several intellectual and critics including philosophers of language, ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists and ordinary people, each with their own ideas and theories about names. . This paper provides an interpretive analysis of traditional Lunda personal names, their meanings and the circumstances under which a child is given the name. The issue I wish to bring to light is that names of persons in Lunda cultural milieu are not mere linguistic means of establishing people’s identity but a mirror of the culture of the Lunda speaking people of Zambia. In other words, like many other Zambia and African cultures, Lunda name givers traditionally choose personal names that reflect their culture.This paper is a contribution to the study of the Lunda anthroponomy. Lunda names, particularly personal names, have not received systematic attention from Africanists to date. The data for this paper included interviews with Lunda natives, my knowledge, experience and introspection. I also consulted books on personal names written by African and Africanist scholars such as crane, Madubuike, Stewart, Zawawi, Tembo, among others.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.