This book is about personal names, something of abiding interest to specialists and lay readers alike. Over a million people have checked the American Name Society website since 1996, for instance. Many philosophers and linguists suggest that names are 'just' labels, but parents internationally are determined to get their children's names 'right'. Personal names may be given, lost, traded, stolen and inherited. This collection of essays provides comparative ethnography through which we examine the politics of naming; the extent to which names may be property-like; and the power of names themselves, both to fix and to destabilize personal identity. Our purpose is not only to renew anthropological attention to names and naming, but to show how this intersects with current interests in political processes, the relation between bodies and personal identities, ritual and daily social life.

In this handbook, scholars from around the world offer an up-to-date account of the state of the art in different areas of onomastics, in a format that is both useful to specialists in related fields and accessible to the general reader. Since Ancient Greece, names have been regarded as central to the study of language, and this has continued to be a major theme of both philosophical and linguistic enquiry throughout the history of Western thought. The investigation of name origins is more recent, as is the study of names in literature. Relatively new is the study of names in society, which draws on techniques from sociolinguistics and has gradually been gathering momentum over the last few decades. The structure of this volume reflects the emergence of the main branches of name studies, in roughly chronological order. The first Part focuses on name theory and outlines key issues about the role of names in language, focusing on grammar, meaning, and discourse. Parts II and III deal with the study of place-names and personal names respectively, while Part IV outlines contrasting approaches to the study of names in literature, with case studies from different languages and time periods. Part V explores the field of socio-onomastics, with chapters relating to the names of people, places, and commercial products. Part VI then examines the interdisciplinary nature of name studies, before the concluding Part presents a selection of animate and inanimate referents ranging from aircraft to animals, and explains the naming strategies adopted for them.

What accounts for our tastes? Why and how do they change over time? Stanley Lieberson analyzes children's first names to develop an original theory of fashion. He disputes the commonly-held notion that tastes in names (and other fashions) simply reflect societal shifts.

The volume seeks to establish socio-onomastics as a field of linguistic inquiry not only within sociolinguistics, but also, and in particular, within pragmatics. The linguistic study of names has a very long history, but also a history sometimes fraught with skepticism, and thus often neglected by linguists in other fields. The volume takes on the challenge of instituting onomastic study into linguistics and pragmatics by focusing on recent trends within socio-onomastics, interactional onomastics, contact onomastics, folk onomastics, and linguistic landscape studies. The volume is an introduction to these fields – with the introductory chapter giving an overview of, and an update on, recent onomastic study – and in addition offers detailed in-depth analyses of place names, person names, street names and commercial names from different perspectives: historically, as well as from the point of view of the impact of globalization and glocalization. All the chapters focus on the use and function of names and naming, on changes in name usage, and on the reasons for, processes in, and results of names in contact.

This edited book examines names and naming policies, trends and practices in a variety of multicultural contexts across America, Europe, Africa and Asia. In the first part of the book, the authors take theoretical and practical approaches to the study of names and naming in these settings, exploring legal, societal, political and other factors. In the second part of the book, the authors explore ways in which names mirror and contribute to the construction of identity in areas defined by multiculturalism. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to onomastics, and it will be of interest to scholars working across a number of fields, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, politics, geography, history, religion and cultural studies.

This book examines how names in Africa have been fashioned to create dominance and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, others and self. Drawing on global and African examples, but with particular reference to Zimbabwe, the author demonstrates how names are used in class, race, ethnic, national, gender, sexuality, religious and business struggles in society as weapons by ingroups and outgroups. Using Othering theory as a framework, the chapters explore themes such as globalised names and their demonstration of the other; onomastic erasure in colonial naming and the subsequent decoloniality in African name changes; othering of women in onomastics and crude and sophisticated phaulisms in the areas of race, ethnicity, nationality, disability and sexuality. Highlighting social power dynamics through onomastics, this book will be of interest to researchers of onomastics, social anthropology, sociolinguistics and African culture and history.