The article deals with the proposed new law on personal names in Sweden, as well as with some important features on the recent giving and usage of personal names. In the first part of the article, the most important issues in the new proposal are presented, and their similarities or discrepancies with the present law are discussed. In the second part, some new baby names and fashionable names types of both first names and family names are studied. The author argues that, even though there are many examples of newly coined names (or unique spellings), the structure of the Swedish naming system is fairly solid, and poses some questions on what might happen under the future law.
The article examines place-name archives and broader place-name collections of various kinds as research infrastructures in the digital age. The main goal is to showcase the opportunities digitization offers to create born-digital data and metadata that open up new research questions and possibilities to conduct interdisciplinary humanistic research based on name materials. At the same time, the article does not turn a blind eye to the problems inherent in the digitization of cultural heritage. Embarking on the ongoing discussions on information and knowledge organisation in digital humanities, the article demonstrates the simplifications name materials usually undergo in research infrastructures because of the currently prevalent digital gazetteer model firmly rooted in the traditional database mindset. It is concluded that the dialogue between the analogue, the physical, and the digital is needed to reform current digitization “musts” and create digital spatial research infrastructures that can function as future interdisciplinary hubs for name-based research.
The aim of the article is to set adaptation of replicated place names (loaned names in traditional terminology) in a larger perspective by exploring a number of ways of conceptualising and studying the phenomenon within contact onomastics and contact linguistics. Many of the inquiries into this topic are deeply-rooted in settlement history, but I would like to open up for an option of a primarily linguistic investigation of place name adaptation as a process that in many ways resembles that of so called toponymic analogy. I see place name replication and place name adaptation as two different although related processes, a theoretical stance explored and built on in my doctoral thesis (2016), which forms a frame work for the present study. According to my definition of place name adaptation the difference between “native” and replicated place names can be said to disappear once the replication process is completed, because all place names irrespective of their etymology follow the development of the target language. There is however always a possibility of semantically adapting replicated place names in the long run which comprises one of the factors working against complete equivalence of “native” and replicated names. In the article I present some research opportunities revealed once the difference between “native” and replicated place names no longer is the sole matter of investigation.