What's in a Name? Reasons Behind the Choice of Contemporary Traditional and Non.traditional Croatian Names

• Published in: Folia onomastica Croatica 2017-01 (26), p.35-68
• Main Author: Krunoslav Puškar
• Format: Article
• Language: ger
• Subjects: anthroponymy; social intuition; socio-anthroponomastics
• ISSN: 1330-0695; 1848-7858

This paper deals with the contemporary Croatian anthroponymicon. Although there has been a lot of research into Croatian first names in the recent years, all of the studies primarily dealt with the frequency of names, their provenance, and the degrees of their adaptation into the Croatian language system, but not with the actual motivation behind name choice. This study, therefore, tries to fill this gap by analysing parents’ answers on the reasons for giving their children certain names during the last ten years. By doing so, this study has departed from the usual onomastic research and has turned towards more popular socio-anthroponomastic one. The research was conducted in three kindergartens in the town of Križevci and focused, therefore, only on children attending them. Having employed a questionnaire method consisting of close-ended and open-ended items, our research tried to discover the true motivation behind the repertoire of 122 first names which we collected, 47 of which are traditional and 75 non-traditional names. Since there can be quite a number of rea-sons behind name choice, we analysed them through the prism of the concept of social intuition or social factors which usually influence name choice, such as parents’ education, child’s gender, the way parents want to present them-selves and their children in society, etc. These social factors were analysed separately for traditional and separately for non-traditional names in order to compare them and see why non-traditional names are gaining more and more popularity in the contemporary Croatian onomasticon. Although our research mostly concentrated on first names that were given rather recently (and) with-in a smaller social environment, the results obtained at the micro level provided us with invaluable facts about the socio-anthroponomastic situation at the macro level.