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Document Type

Original Study

Subject Areas

History/ Archaeology

Keywords

intercultural communication, ethnicity, name-giving, values and beliefs

Abstract

Name-giving, in addition to being an act of designation or official registration, implies the cultural identity of name-givers. One obvious aspect is showing the social values and practices in an area. This study aims to explore the social factors which motivate name- giving among Kurdish ethnicity of Iran. The corpus of data for the analysis included the National Organization for Civil Registration of Iran, Kurdish websites, interviews, and questionnaires given to Kurdish citizens of Kurdistan. The important classifying variable is the socio-cultural preferences which were compared through using the frequency of different categories of names. The results of the study showed that ten categories would divide first names; the five most frequently used categories of names include: reference to ethical qualities, nature, geographical locations, ancient characters, and outer physical features respectively. Another goal of the study concerned the diachronic changes in name- giving which was carried out by comparing the most frequent names of two age groups: 60 years or older compared with the 25 years or younger. Interesting findings were uncovered which showed three trends of change among the Kurdish name-givers: a shift from common nationwide names towards ethnic Kurdish names, and sectarian to names referring to ethical qualities; additionally, a tendency was observed to move from combined name compounds to simple ones. The implications of these findings might be interpreted as name-givers’ preference for not only maintaining ethnic independence but also an observable desire to display a sense of unity.

Publication Date

2015

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