Truly rural? Urban and rural characters of Czech first names as perceived by inhabitants of the Moravian-Silesian Region
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48075/odal.v7i1.36638Keywords:
name perception, rural areas, urban areas, onomastic knowledge, quantitative onomasticsAbstract
This article aims to investigate whether a set of Czech first names is perceived as typical of urban or rural areas by inhabitants of the Moravian-Silesian Region, a distinctive post-industrial area located in the Czech Republic borderlands. It seeks to understand whether this perception is consistent with official census data or influenced by stereotypes and personal experiences. The research draws on the notion of onomastic knowledge (Seide, 2021a; 2021b), which posits that a speaker’s knowledge about personal names is built through experiences, beliefs, and memories, and may diverge from scientific knowledge based on official census data. To this end, an online questionnaire was developed and distributed via Microsoft Forms. It contained a list of names (18 male and 25 female names), each of which accompanied with a Likert scale with the alternatives “city,” “village,” and “neutral,” for the respondents to report their perceptions about each name. The names were selected through a complex four-stage, statistically informed procedure. The responses provided by 127 participants were analysed, most of them women (69%) and aged 21–30 years old (55%). The findings show that respondents’ perceptions and census data converge for 44% of the female names and 50% of the male names. While such a convergence indicates that the speakers’ onomastic knowledge may relate to actual data, the divergence points to the influence of stereotypes, such as the association of traditional or religious names with rural areas. This study is expected to inspire researchers to carry out further investigations on the subject and possibly help future parents make informed choices of names based on their social and cultural aspects
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