Names and Naming in Contact Situations

Dear Colleagues,

Names are powerful social and cultural resources through which individuals and communities negotiate identity, belonging, memory, power, and place (Ainiala & Östman 2017; Aldrin 2016). This Special Issue seeks to advance research in socio-onomastics, with particular attention to the social dimensions of personal and place names and naming practices in multilingual, multicultural, and transnational contexts. Onomastic research has increasingly shown the ways naming practices, including historical, both reflect and shape social relations, language ideologies, and processes of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. Beké 2022; Benor & Chandler 2024; Coates 2012; Fernández Juncal 2018; Parada 2020; Pennesi 2019; Rodríguez 2022; Sue 2025).

Advances in critical toponymy have deepened our awareness of place names as socio-politically contested instruments of power, identity, memory, and territorialization. This work has moved the field beyond descriptive accounts to more interpretive analyses of struggles over space, identity, and historical representation. For example, Rose-Redwood et al. (2010) argue that place names should be understood as forms of toponymic inscription through which political actors materialize particular spatial narratives and social meanings. Recent scholarship has also highlighted the diverse scales, actors, and motivations involved in naming processes. In a review of urban toponymic research, Rusu (2021) demonstrates how street names, on their face mere navigational tools, are resources through which states, local authorities, and communities negotiate collective memory, heritage, and political legitimacy. Within the growing sociolinguistics subfield of linguistic landscape research, recent calls to consider “revitalizing its onomastic roots” (Kallen 2023: 250) show promise for exciting new interdisciplinary research directions on place names in situations of linguistic and cultural contact. Such directions include questions at the intersection of place names and personal names (e.g. Parada 2021; Regan 2022), as well as around the role of linguistic landscape in toponymic salience and attachment (Kostanski 2016).

Likewise, personal names research has focused on accounting for the complexity of forces that shape both formal and informal naming practices. Personal names function as key resources for the construction and often moment-to-moment negotiation of individual and collective identities, reflecting factors such as ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, migration, and linguistic affiliation (Ainiala & Östman 2017; Aldrin 2016). Scholars have shown how naming choices are influenced by language ideologies, family traditions, globalization, and transnational mobility, while also serving as sites where belonging and difference are negotiated (Benor & Chandler 2024; Parada 2020). Research has further highlighted the role of names in processes of migration, standardization, resistance, and cultural maintenance in multilingual and diasporic communities (Pennesi 2019). How individuals, families, and ethnic groups negotiate multiple and intersecting linguistic and cultural affiliations through names continues to constitute a fascinating line of inquiry, while there is also a specific need to explore these questions in online spaces and social media (i.e. digital anthroponomy). Comparative and longitudinal perspectives are especially important to better understand how naming practices evolve across generations and sociopolitical contexts.

We invite contributions that examine how names are created, used, contested, transformed, and interpreted in contexts characterized by migration, language and cultural contact, minority language maintenance, colonization and decolonization, displacement, globalization, and digital communication. Contributions focused on Hispanic personal and place names in minority and diasporic settings are particularly welcome.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Personal and place naming practices among minority and heritage-language communities
• Names and identity construction in diasporic contexts
• Place names, linguistic landscapes, and toponymic politics
• Intersections between anthroponomastics/anthroponomy and toponomastics/toponymy
• Naming and language revitalization efforts
• Indigenous naming practices and decolonial approaches to onomastics
• Ethnonyms, variable use and perceptions
• Name changes and adaptations across languages and writing systems
• Names and social stratification, ethnicity, gender, religion, or class
• Naming practices in borderlands and contact zones
• Digital and social media naming practices
• Commemorative naming and collective memory
• Names and language pedagogies
• Methodological innovations in socio-onomastic research
• Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches linking onomastics with sociolinguistics, anthropology, geography, history, and cultural studies

Interested authors are invited to submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–250 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (mparada1@csub.edu) or to Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Ainiala, T., & Östman, J.-O. (Eds.). (2017). Socio-Onomastics: The Pragmatics of Names. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Aldrin, E. (2016). Names and identity. In C. Hough (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming (pp. 382–394). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beké, L. (2022). Place naming and toponymic silencing in the sierras of Northern Nuevo México. Journal of the Southwest, 64(3), 495–528.

Benor, S. B., & Chandler, A. B. (2024). Categorizing personal names among Jews in the contemporary United States. Onoma, 59, 49.

Coates, R. (2012). A toponomastic contribution to the linguistic prehistory of the British Isles. Nomina, 35, 49–102.

Fernández Juncal, C. (2018). Evolution of anthroponyms in an area of linguistic transition: a socio-onomastic study. Names, 66(2), 85–95.

Kallen, J. L. (2023). Linguistic landscapes: A sociolinguistic approach. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316822807

Regan, B. (2022). Guadalupe or Guadaloop? Place-name variation and place identity in Austin, Texas. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 97(4), 441–482.

Parada, M. (2020). A socio-onomastic study of Spanish receptive bilinguals. In S. M. Alvord & G. L. Thompson (Eds.), Spanish in the US: Variation and attitudes (pp. 56–73). Routledge.

Parada, M. (2021). Anthroponymic persistence of Spanish vestigial . In W. Chappell & B. Drinka (Eds.), Spanish socio-historical linguistics: Isolation and contact (pp. 205–230). John Benjamins.

Pennesi, K. (2019). Differential responses to constraints on naming agency among indigenous peoples and immigrants in Canada. Language & Communication, 64, 91–103.

Rodríguez, Y. V. (2022). Spanish place names of the Falkland Islands: A novel classification system. Names, 70(1), 1–8.

Rose-Redwood, R., Alderman, D., & Azaryahu, M. (2010). Geographies of toponymic inscription: New directions in critical place-name studies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(4), 453–470.

Rusu, M.S. (2021). Street naming practices: A systematic review of urban toponymic scholarship. Onoma, 56, 269–292. https://doi.org/10.34158/ONOMA.56/2021/14.

Sue, C. A. (2025). Intensive naming: Concerted cultivation and flexible ethnicity among US middle-class Mexican-origin parents. Social Problems, 72(3), 1167–1181.

Dr. Maryann Parada
Guest Editor

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