News

Updates, events, new publications and more

On this page you will find news about personal names research. If you have something you would like us to announce here, please send an e-mail to Dr. Anna-Maria Balbach.

What’s in a name? 

Interesting blog article by Kevin Schurer in The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure:

Link here.

Report on the 1. Online Meeting, June 12, 2025

by Lea Fritzenkötter


On Thursday, 12 June 2025, the International Network for Personal Names Research, founded in 2024, held its first online meeting. Participants from 24 different countries around the world joined from various time zones and contributed to the meeting's success.
The meeting offered a varied and stimulating programme: Three scientific presentations by Gerrit Bloothooft (Netherlands), Gergana Petkova (Bulgaria) and Maryann Parada (USA) opened the session, providing insights into current onomastic issues and research results. The programme can be viewed here. This was followed by three short research pitches, in which participants presented and discussed their current or planned research projects. The subsequent discussions were inspiring, provided valuable feedback, and opened opportunities for international cooperation.
All participants agreed that there is a need for a platform for the exchange of international name data. The network intends to provide such a platform. To begin with, a category has been set up for this on our network website: Name Data. This will be continuously expanded. In addition, a new shared literature database on Citavi was presented which currently contains over 800 titles. This database is available to all network members and can be expanded to include relevant literature. This will provide the network with a central tool for facilitating international knowledge transfer and improving collaboration in the future.
At the end of the event, there was time for informal networking, enabling all members to get to know each other beyond scientific matters and strengthen collaborations.
 
We are looking forward to the next meeting, which is planned for 2026.
Thank you to all the participants who made this first meeting so enriching with their presence, contributions and ideas. It was a pleasure to meet you and get to know you better!
Anna-Maria Balbach and Emilia Aldrin

Fotos

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New Publication!

We are pleased to announce that the special issue 

"Dis/Continuity in the Representation of Gender in Names Across Cultures” 

has now been published in Sociolinguistic Studies (Vol. 19, 1–2)!

Several members of our network contributed to this issue, which was organized following the last network conference under the leadership of Jane Pilcher and Ivona Barešová. You can find the issue here ( link: https://utppublishing.com/toc/ss/19/1-2). 

Enjoy reading!

 

Call for Papers for the 10th Mainz Names Conference: 

Migration Onomastics: Personal Names in the Context of Migration Movements

Dear colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to the Call for Papers for the 10th Mainz Names Conference “Migrationsonomastik”, which will take place from September 29 to October 1, 2025 at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, Germany. The aim is to examine anthroponyms in connection with language biographies and migration processes. The focus will be on grammatical adaptation processes, transliteration, situational-pragmatic variation or the change of call, family or full names.

We invite all those who deal with personal names and/or migration to submit proposals for contributions (30 minutes + 10 minutes discussion) by March 31, 2025 to migrationsonomastik@adwmainz.de 

For further information, please refer to the attached Call for Papers (German) or (English) and the conference website.

Kind regards

Anne Rosar and Theresa Schweden

The 18th Nordic NORNA-Congress: Names, norms and norm breakages


The Nordic cooperative committee for onomastic research (NORNA) will hold its’ 18th congress in Halmstad, Sweden during 21–23 May 2025 and gather onomastic researchers from all over the Nordic region (and beyond). This year’s topic is Names, norms and norm breakages. Registration without paper (or with poster presentation) can still be made via the conference website: https://www.hh.se/4.27f5742b19206ce9255305ef.html
For further information, please contact norna2025@hh.se