How We Got Our Names: Identity in Personal Names

Abstract

Language is an inherent human function and naming is just one of its multiple and inevitable consequences. Through naming we have defined ourselves through millennia, in ways that have involuntarily bounded human groups up through time and space. A brief history of naming is reviewed in this chapter, drawing from linguistic, historic and anthropological literatures, and illustrated with examples drawn from different countries and time periods both for surnames and forenames. The chapter introduces the idea that naming practices are not at all random, but indeed reflect the social norms and cultural customs of the group, and thus follow distinct geographical and cultural patterns. Although such naming patterns have been studied widely for particular groups of names, languages, religions or world regions, few previous attempts have been made to understand their socio-cultural effect on population structure at large, regardless of their individual historical or linguistic idiosyncrasies. The chapter concludes with an early controversial example of how people’s name origins have been historically used to subdivide contemporary populations into ethnic groups: the use of historical surnames origins to determine the US immigration policy in the first half of the twentieth century.

“For the first time in my life, I felt comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories […] My name belonged and so I belonged”. Barack Obama (2008: 305)