Evolution of Anthroponyms in an Area of Linguistic Transition: A Socio-Onomastic Study

Abstract

This study analyses the evolution of the anthroponymical repertoire of a municipal council located in the west of the province of Vizcaya, in the Spanish Basque Country. It has traditionally been a Spanish-speaking area, although it is now clearly influenced by the language policies of the Basque Autonomous Community to which it belongs, where recent years have witnessed a major expansion in the use of the Basque language in different ambits. This study examines the evolution of onomastic usages over a period that includes the transition from the Franco era to democracy in the 1970s, with the ensuing quantitative and qualitative shift in the choice of children’s names. This period records an abrupt change in tendencies from the traditional Spanish onomastic sources to a new repertoire, somewhat alien to local usages, but with considerable identifying strength, a positive stereotype, and a stratification of the phenomenon according to the gender variable.

Keywords:

• Anthroponymy
• socio-onomastics
• gender patterns
• Spanish
• Basque

Notes

1. Not all the local people have been registered in the council, as in a minority of cases the parents have chosen to record the birth in the council of the hospital where the baby was born.

2. The number of births recorded over the period 1965 to 2015 is 149 (78 males and 71 females), to which we need to add the names of parents and grandparents, which are counted only once if they appear in more than one register, which is easy to detect through their surnames.

3. Søndergaard (1979) reports that up until a hundred years ago in Denmark, there was a pool of only just over thirty names.

4. We are interested in singling out the names of Basque origin, excluding those that have already been phonetically and orthographically assimilated within Spanish tradition (e.g., Javier, Begoña, and Aránzazu).