The Age of Aidans: Cognitive Underpinnings of a New Trend in English Boys' Names

Several sources have recently reported a trend in North American English boys' names. According to this trend, a disproportionate number of boys' names contain a final syllabic nasal. This paper presents two studies that investigate this observation systematically. A corpus linguistic stud...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Names 2019-07, Vol.67 (3), p.160-174
Main Authors: MacAulay, Lauren, Siddiqi, Daniel, Toivonen, Ida
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Corpus analysis
Corpus linguistics
English boys' names
English language
Imogen
Lexical decision task
literary names
Males
Nasals
Olivia
Onomatopoeia
Shakespeare
sound symbolism
Symbolism
Viola
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Several sources have recently reported a trend in North American English boys' names. According to this trend, a disproportionate number of boys' names contain a final syllabic nasal. This paper presents two studies that investigate this observation systematically. A corpus linguistic study of the most popular names in Ontario and the USA revealed that around 40% of English boys' names fit this pattern, which has been called "the Age of Aidans". The second study was a lexical decision task. It was modeled after previous research on sound symbolism (phonosemantics). This experiment demonstrated that speakers preferred pseudo-names for boys that fit the "Age of Aidans"pattern. Taken together, the two studies suggest that final syllabic nasals can be compared to phonesthemes. Current North American speakers of English may perceive disyllabic names ending in syllabic nasals as "good" boys' names.
ISSN:0027-7738
1756-2279
DOI:10.1080/00277738.2018.1490523