onomastikë

Onomastikë is the scholarly study of proper names, focusing on their origin, form, meaning, and use within language and society. As a branch of linguistics and cultural studies, it investigates how names arise, evolve, and reflect social identities, histories, and patterns of contact between languages. The field encompasses various categories of names, including personal names, place names, and other onomastic types, and examines the rules by which communities assign and preserve them over time.

Subfields typically include anthroponymy (the study of personal names and family names), toponymy (place names), ethnonyms, hydronymy (water-body names), and the growing analysis of corporate or brand naming in contemporary contexts. Onomastics also considers naming practices across generations, the influence of religion and language on names, and how political and demographic changes affect name forms and distributions. In multilingual or multicultural settings, name variation can illuminate language contact, identity, and social dynamics.

Methods combine linguistic analysis with philology, historical records, and sociolinguistic surveys. Researchers rely on archival sources such as church registers, census data, legal documents, migration records, and oral histories. Digital corpora and geographic information systems support cross-linguistic and diachronic studies, enabling indexing, standardization, and comparative research across regions and periods.

Onomastikë has practical relevance for linguistics, anthropology, history, genealogy, and public administration, informing naming practices, cultural heritage preservation, and policy considerations. While it includes Albanian-language contexts and traditions, the field is global, interdisciplinary, and comparative, spanning diverse languages and cultural settings.