Personal names in cross-cultural settings

Names are linguistic units that not only individualise and identify people but also function as social markers, are embedded in cultural and political discourses, and underlie national laws. These social aspects of names and naming systems can cause conflicts in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Names are everywhere and at the centre of our daily social interaction, yet are understudied in sociolinguistic research. Focusing on Western, Central and Eastern European contexts, this article presents an exploratory, theory-driven historical-sociolinguistic study of personal names in cross-cultural settings. It draws on case studies as presented in secondary sources about examples including highly mobile multilingual individuals, name choices by emigrants and multilingual minorities, forced name changes of minority groups under nationalising regimes and institutional conflicts over the spelling of foreign names. Analytically, the study includes a multi-level approach including the public and the private sphere and synthesises the examples in theoretical concepts – individual parallel names, interlingual allonymy, identity and indexicality, and translanguaging – to link historical and contemporary cases and to explain how language ideologies and processes of language standardisation and nation-building underpin current onomastic conflicts. The article argues that a historical, theory-driven perspective is crucial for understanding present-day onomastic conflicts.