About the Network

This network brings together scholars from all countries who are engaged in research on personal names. Scholars in many different disciplines around the world are researching names, but often they hardly know about each other and their research literature is difficult to access in other countries.

This is where the network comes in. Scientists around the world can

• get in touch with each other,
• exchange information about who is doing which research in which country,
• exchange news about international names research and conferences,
• discuss ideas and methodological problems and
• list and upload their publications (coming soon) and make them accessible to all international researchers by adding English keywords and summaries.

In this way, each individual names researcher can gain more visibility, network with others, exchange ideas and in the best case even start a joint international names research project.

The network was founded in 2024 by Anna-Maria Balbach. It continues and expands the “People's Names Research Network (PNRN)”, which was launched by Jane Pilcher in 2021.Researchers from all disciplines are invited to network and exchange ideas.

If you would like to join the network or learn more about it, please write to Dr. Anna-Maria Balbach.

Looking forward to welcome new members!

News

Updates, Events, new publications and more

Collaborations, other onomastics networks and platforms

 

Onomastics journals and publication opportunities for members of our network

Our Members

 

Terhi Ainiala, University of Helsinki, Finland

In the fields of onomastics, the most central areas for me are socio-onomastics and folk onomastics. I’m especially interested in identity construction through naming, social and situational name variation and the various functions of names. Furthermore, the stances and perceptions towards various names are fascinating. Personally, I have studied place names but also personal names. As a supervisor for several doctoral and master thesis I’ve been involved with many kinds of personal names, both official and unofficial, both historical and current.

Emilia Aldrin, Halmstad University, Sweden

My research interests centre around social positioning and identity creation through naming. I have studied for example parents choice of first names for their children as an act of identity, name choices in multilingual families, gendered patterns in name innovations, teenagers positioning through usernames, the effects of name based stereotypes in school assessment, and name use in educational materials as representation of society.

Kathryn Almack, University of Hertfordshire, UK

As a family sociologist, I am interested in naming choices and decision making and what it can reveal about issues of family identity, best interests of the child and the relative positioning of, and negotiations between, biological and social parents. I have written about this in relation to lesbian parent couples having children in the context of their relationship and making decisions about their children’s surnames. The negotiations and working out of family lives involved for lesbian parent couples made all the more explicit, and thus more visible, some of the more common processes undertaken by all families.

Anna-Maria Balbach, University of Muenster, Germany

E-Mail: Anna.Balbach@uni-muenster.de

I am a linguist of German philology studying the interdependence of language and society, culture and especially religion in diachronic and synchronic perspective. I am interested in onomastics of personal names and their influence by these external factors. Who chooses what names for what reasons at what times? What do personal names, especially given names, tell us about a person’s values and various affiliations within his or her society and culture? So far, I have studied German given names of the early modern period,  African-American names and their development from 1600 to the present, as well as personal names and gender.

Currently, I am planning a research project on given names in Europe and their historical and contemporary development.

• Publications:

  Given Names and Gender: An Initial Comparison between Germany and Other European Countries. In: Sociolinguistic Studies (2025), 25 pages (accepted).

  Noah and Luca, Sofia and Mia: Current First Name Trends in Europe. In: Linguistica Lettica (2024), p. 76–95.

  Personal Names and Naming in Europe. First Insights into Variabilities and Similarities. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 58/4 (2023), p. 355–392.

  Names, Naming (People), Christianity - Modern Europe. In: Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR), vol. 20. Berlin, Boston 2022, p. 699–706.

  „Rose, formerly called Grace“. Fremd- und selbstinitiierter Namenwechsel afro-amerikanischer Sklaven im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 56 (2021), p. 79–104.

  Caesar, Jack, and Cuffee: African-American fugitive slave names in the 17th to the 19th century. In: ONOMA 55 (2021), p. 205–227.

  Die Scrabble-Score-Methode zur Messung sprachlicher Komplexität – Ein Test anhand von 90.000 Rufnamen aus dem SOEP. In: SOEPpapers 990 (2018), p. 1–14.

  Von Agustin über Tom zu DaShawn – Zur Geschichte und Entwicklung so genannter ‚Black Names‘ in den USA. Teil 3: Von der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts bis heute In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 3 (2018), p. 283–338. Abstract.

  Von Agustin über Tom zu DaShawn – Zur Geschichte und Entwicklung so genannter ‚Black Names‘ in den USA. Teil 2: Vom Ende der Sklaverei bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 2 (2018), p. 133–185. Abstract.

  Von Agustin über Tom zu DaShawn – Zur Geschichte und Entwicklung so genannter ‚Black Names‘ in den USA. Teil 1. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 1 (2018), p. 1–45. Abstract.

  Name – Geschlecht – Individuum. Konfessioneller Einfluss auf die Vornamengebung im frühneuzeitlichen Bayerisch-Schwaben. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung 2/2014, p. 127–163.

  Jakob, Johann oder Joseph? - Frühneuzeitliche Vornamen im Streit der Konfessionen. In: Konfession und Sprache in der Frühen Neuzeit. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Hrsg. von Jürgen Macha, Anna-Maria Balbach und Sarah Horstkamp. Münster 2012, p. 11–30.

Ivona Barešová, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

I have been mostly working on various aspects of Japanese given names, including the recent phenomenon of non-gender-specific names. I enjoy exploring how names reflect the period in which they were bestowed – the values, needs, wishes and aspirations of the parents, and various contemporary events. Recently I have been also working on some comparative analyses of Japanese and Taiwanese names and naming practices.

Katrine Bechsgaard, University of California, Berkeley, USA / University of Copenhagen, Denmark

My research focuses on sociolinguistics and socioonomastics – on how language and names are used in and reflect contemporary society. I am interested in naming practices, especially in terms of how name choices are related to identity. I have studied Danish parents’ choice of first names for children, written a book examining cultural, sociological, linguistic, and psychological aspects of naming, and my current project focuses on surname choices, family practices, gender, and identity.

Jane Bryan, University of Warwick, UK

I am a Reader of Law at the University of Warwick and the Academic Lead of our Community Values Education Programme. I am interested in dialogue in several contexts: as a way to develop reflective teaching practice through peer dialogue, as a way to engage students in their learning through supporting the student voice and as a way to resolve conflicts through mediation and restorative approaches. My interest in the importance of names and correct pronunciation arises in part from my wider attempts to remove barriers to dialogue that can arise in the teaching space and beyond.

Elian Carsenat, Namsor, France

I am a private researcher on names and created NamSor applied onomastics software in 2012. The idea was to apply various machine learning algorithms to names. For example, we train a probabilistic model to distinguish personal names from place names, brand names etc. which is mostly used to clean data. Also, we have a model to infer gender from names, combining baby name statistics and morphology, which provides accurate probabilities in all regions / alphabets which is used in large gender studies (EU SheFigures ; Elsevier’s reports on gender in research). Finaly, we work on models to classify names by ‘race’/ethnicity or country of origin and apply those models to the complex and important problem of estimating ethnic biases in external algorithms (recruitment, credit allocations etc.)

Francesco Cerchiaro, Center for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Belgium

I am a cultural sociologist with a specific interest in the intersection of family, migration and religion. I came across the study of names during my research on Christian-Muslim families in Italy, France and Belgium. Although mixed couples are often interpreted as a marker of the gradual loosening of traditional ties, naming practices, on the contrary, show parents’ attempt to pass down their racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds. Moreover, naming practices open up a new perspective to analyse how partners mediate with the expectations of the family of origin and with the social context characterised by a growing islamophobia.

Hannah Deakin-Smith, Nottingham Trent University, UK

I am a social scientist, and my earlier research focused on international student and academic mobility. More recently, I have researched people’s names and identities. As a researcher on the ‘Say My Name’ project, I examined experiences of the pronunciation of student names within higher education in England in the context of culturally diverse student identities. I was also a researcher on a project on long term trends in name changes via analyses of enrolled deed polls. From September 2022, I will be working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Name stories: experiences of names & naming in adoptive family life’.

Thomas Ditye, Sigmund Freud University, Austria

Together with my colleague Lisa Welleschik I am interested in the psychological mechanisms of the inability to call others by their personal names. Concerned individuals report to experience anxieties and emotional stress in situations in which calling someone by their name is intended. Our data show that the problem is getting more severe the closer the relationship, linking it to identity and attachment. We have started referring to this condition by “alexinomia” which means “no words for names” and are currently exploring the topic using quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Birgit Eggert, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

I am an onomastician and Nordic philologist. I am interested in personal names as a mirror of cultural currents in society. I mainly use quantitative data from censuses and church books to describe the changes that have taken place in naming over time, and how these changes have manifested differently in relation to time, place and social position, i.e., how innovations spread in society. My research is primarily historical, but I have also worked on trends and changes in today’s baby names, both in terms of the names and of their spelling.

Andrew Francis-Tan, National University of Singapore

I am a quantitative social scientist. My research aims to understand patterns of inequality and factors that influence social identities like race and gender. My interest in names is personal. My current family name is a combination of my spouse’s family name and my own. Growing up, people often mistook my family name (Francis) as my first/given name. Thus, I became aware that Francis was a gender ambiguous name, since the name Frances, usually given to women, was pronounced identically. More recently, I teamed up with Aliya Saperstein to investigate the socioeconomic implications of having a gender discordant first/given name. Our work is now published in Social Science Research.

Linnea Gustafsson, Halmstad University, Sweden

With a starting point in the field of linguistics, my research interest is how personal names are used in society and what they mean to their bearers. The perspective has often been within the questions of identity and otherness. Regarding personal names, I have, among other things, worked with the acceptance and spreading of new first names, the creation, and use of nicknames, structural differences between female and male first names, class differences within name giving, and names from different cultures in contact.

Federica Guccini, University of Western Ontario, Canada

As an anthropologist interested in the intersections of migration, language, and identity, I study personal names in plurilingual contexts. I examine how naming practices change when people migrate and experience shifts in their language(s) and identities. I have applied this to contexts of historical Hakka Chinese migration from southern China to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean as well as contemporary Chinese international student mobility. Informed by decolonial understandings of language, I am currently conceptualizing a translanguaging approach to naming practices that seeks to detangle names from monolingual and raciolinguistic ideologies.

Lasse Hämäläinen, University of Helsinki, Finland

My primary area of onomastic research are online usernames, i.e., names that people choose for their personal user accounts on various websites. I am especially interested in how usernames represent the identities of their owners and the cultures of online communities, as well as how they influence the communication between website users. Moreover, I have studied Finnish given names using a large given name corpus provided by the Finnish Civil Registry.

Petros Karatsareas, University of Westminster, UK

I specialise in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism with a focus on contexts of transnational mobility. Working on/with/for minoritised groups of migrant origin, I examine the central role language plays in the construction and projection of individual and community identities, diasporic relations, bi-/multilingual education as well as in processes and experiences of discrimination, precarisation, deskilling, and downward occupational mobility among people on the move. One of my current investigations centres on (re)naming practices among Greek Cypriot migrants in the UK and Albanian migrants in Greece coupled with religious practices such as (in)voluntary baptisms as strategies to counter the effects of racism, xenophobia, and social inequality.

Sophie Kihm, Nameberry, USA

I am the Editor-in-Chief of Nameberry, the world’s largest website about names. Nameberry analyzes name trends and popularity, as well as works with expectant parents and others to choose names for their children and themselves. I am particularly interested in the intersection of names and identity, such as how a parent’s personal identity affects their choice of baby names, and how children’s names can define a family identity.

Sofia Kotilainen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

I am a historian and a sociolinguist. My onomastic research focuses on personal names and the (long-term) cultural and social name-giving practices in the local communities. I have been analysing the motives of the choice of inherited first names and inherited surnames in Finnish family networks, godparenthood (namesakes), identities and mentalities of naming, as well as nicknames in the social networks. I have created a methodological concept of onomastic literacy (see Kotilainen 2022). I am also interested in royal names and naming traditions.

Francis T. McAndrew, Knox College, USA

I am an evolutionary social psychologist who studies “namesaking,” which is the naming of a child after a parent or other relative. I am specifically interested in how namesaking is employed as a strategy for advertising personal and group identity, for optimally positioning a child within the historical and political framework of the kinship group, and for bonding fathers more strongly to their children. I am also interested in how namesaking and birth order interact in the formation of stereotypes about the personalities of namesaked individuals.

Jean-François Mignot, GEMASS, Sorbonne University and French National Center for Scientific Research, France

I am a demographer and a sociologist and I use first names to describe long-term trends in individualization, gender differences and immigrant assimilation in France and in the West. How do the number and distribution of first names since the 1800s reflect parents’ willingness to give their child a unique identity and to make others regard it as unique? To what extent do boys and girls’ first names sound different, and what does that tell us about parental expectations regarding their children? Which immigrants give their children first names that resemble those of their host society (vs origin country)? My current project is on the phonosemantics (‘bouba-kiki effect’) of male and female first names given in France since 1900.

Rexhina Ndoci, Ohio State University, USA

As a sociolinguist I focus on the relationship between language and ethnic identity. More recently I have become interested in names with a goal of exploring the indexical meaning of ethnically marked names, name adaptations, and name changes among minoritized groups such as migrants. Moreover, I am interested in questions pertaining to the adaptation of ethnic names into majority-passing names and how those adaptations, or lack thereof, affect candidates’ chances in the job market.

Sharon Obasi, University of Nebraska Kearney, USA

My onomastic scholarship examines the influence of family on how we self-identify, how we are identified by others and the connections between identity, the articulation of policy and the development of programs to help minoritized and/or marginalized communities.

Idowu Odebode, Redeemer’s University, Nigeria

I am a Professor of Onomastics, Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics in the Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Nigeria. My interest has been in the different aspects of names/naming in Africa, particularly among the Yoruba, where the socio-cultural context(s)/circumstances (of the name-givers and, or bearers) are considered before naming a child. I have worked on multicultural aspects of names and naming in Nigeria, literary onomastics (of selected African writers like Wole Soyinka), anthroponyms on Facebook, socio-pragmatics of names, African zoonyms (in polygamous homes), names and identities among others. I am the founding president of the Society for the Study of Names in Nigeria (SSNN), the first winner of the prestigious American Name Society Emerging Scholar Award, and a Professional Commonwealth Scholar (onomastics) mentored at the University of Glasgow.

Ayokunmi Ojebode, University of Nottingham, UK

I am an expert in African literature, Cultural studies and Literary Onomastics. I have dedicated most of my studies to unearthing the postcolonial significance of personal names in popular Nigerian literature underpinned to the literary and sociocultural contexts. I seek to connect the personal names to processes within the Nigerian society, culture and literature. My current projects border on naming, ecology, identities, and religion and explore naming practices in different contexts and settings.

Liam Ó hAisibéil, University of Galway, Ireland

I am an Assistant Professor in Irish at the University of Galway, Ireland, where I teach modules on onomastics and medieval Irish literature. I have been involved in onomastic research since 2006, and my research typically involves the study of place and personal names in Ireland. I am interested in naming practices and the lexical analysis of names in medieval Irish literature, and also in current naming trends, particularly in tracing the anglicisation process and the adoption/translation of personal names in Ireland over time, and in the revival and restoration of Irish-language forms of personal names in official records since the early 20th century.

Karen Pennesi, University of Western Ontario, Canada

I began my research on names by investigating the experiences of people whose names do not fit into the legal, institutional and conventional frameworks for the structure, spelling and pronunciation of names in Canada. As symbols of identity, I explore how names influence self-perception and the unequal treatment of others. Given how names are especially important to social integration and belonging, I have published recommendations for treating names respectfully in a linguistically and culturally diverse society. I am currently developing a critical theoretical approach to public discourses in which names serve as objects for displaying stances toward immigrants, Indigenous people, and other racialized groups.

Jane Pilcher, Nottingham Trent University, UK

I am a sociologist and use names to analyse, understand and deconstruct identities and inequalities. I am interested in naming practices in terms of identities and bodies, and in relation to greater diversity and flexibility in contemporary gender identities and family relationships. My current projects include the pronunciation of names in higher education in the context of culturally diverse student identities, names and naming in adoption, and long term trends in name changing via an analysis of enrolled deed polls.

Eugen Schochenmaier, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

I have been researching onomastics since 2002 with a wide range of interests: from textual analysis of proprial units and modified proper names to their semantics, from mapping surnames’ landscapes to high/middle-frequency family names’ studies. Working in cooperation with various scientists and new media in pursuit of names-related information, I am trying to improve the connectivity of onomasticians worldwide. For my part, I set a goal to clarify to what extent the typical surname-driven motives are similar throughout the world. Besides that, my dream would be to discuss the substantiation of the “Applied onomastics” as a new sub-discipline. With a Doctorate from the University Paris X (2009), I am the blogger behind e-Onomastics, the most visited blog dedicated to name research (more than one million visits). In 2017, I was elected to the Board of Directors at ICOS (International Council of Onomastic Sciences).

Julia Sinclair-Palm, Carleton University, Canada

I am an Assistant Professor in Childhood and Youth Studies in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University. My research with young trans people explores how young people forge new identities, imagine futures and navigate structural inequalities. I am interested in how trans youth choose a name, the narratives they draw on to describe their naming process, and the factors that influence how they chose a name.

Xiaoying Qi, Australia Catholic University, Australia

I am a sociologist. In conducting research on transformations of family life and family structure in contemporary China [see Qi, Xiaoying (2021) Remaking Families in Contemporary China, Oxford University Press], I came across an emerging surnaming practice. This is the provision of the mother’s surname to her child, rather than the father’s. What appears to be a demonstration of feminist power, the practice in fact operates to preserve the patriarchal line of a daughter-only family. Through development of the concept of ‘veiled patriarchy’ I demonstrate how surnaming is influenced by a number of factors, including inter-generational relations, gender cultures, and the power of property within and between families. I also examine the emotional dimension of surnaming, which is under-researched in this sparsely examined sociological space.

Peyman Ghassemi Pour Sabet, Curtin University, Australia

My interest in onomastics lies in the link between socio-political changes and changes they cause in the naming practice in society. Being more than just a personal choice, naming can manifest the socio-political inclinations of any society. Any significant changes in these inclinations will bring about changes in the naming practice too. The current research project I am contributing to is a study of the link between changes in Chinese given names and social changes over a period of 200 years.

Rachael Robnett, University of Nevada, USA

I am a psychologist and in my research I am interested in links between marriage traditions and the decisions people make about surnames.

Ranjana Srinivasan, Teachers College Columbia University, New York & licensed clinical psychologist, USA

I am a licensed clinical psychologist studying the experiences of name-based microaggressions within racial and cultural minority populations in the United States. “Name-based microaggressions” constitute a specific category of microaggressions that capture the subtle discriminatory comments that minority individuals experience due to their first and last names of cultural origin. Examples of name-based microaggressions include: assignment of an unwanted nickname, assumptions and biases about an individual based on their name, and teasing from peers and educators due to cultural aspects of a name. My research uncovered the mental health impact of name-based microaggressions and the coping mechanisms that minority populations utilize to combat these discriminatory experiences. It also provides treatment recommendations for mental health professionals and educators who are working with minority individuals with names of ethnic origin.

Elizabeth Suter, University of Denver, USA

Jana Valdrová, University of Innsbruck, Austria

I am a gender linguist, and an associate researcher at the University of Innsbruck. I am interested in how the system of female and male names supports and legitimizes the binary perception of gender. Gender-neutral names are “intruders in the system” – they embody a critical reflection on the gendered world, but in patriarchalist regimes they are seen as a threat to “traditional values”. As a forensic expert, I focus on gender-neutral names in Czech legislation and Czech onomastics. I am currently analyzing onomastic literature and legislation in terms of equal treatment of names.

Stephen Wu, Hamilton College, USA

I am an economist and my research spans the fields of higher education, health economics, labor economics, and the economics of subjective well-being. I am interested in studying different ways to measure name fluency, and also studying discrimination due to name pronunciation. Among my current projects, I am researching the impact of difficult-to-pronounce names on job outcomes in academic labor markets.