Ellen Bramwell

Scots in the community: place-names and social networking

This paper reports on the project Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP), which is designed to explore the innovative potential of integrated online community engagement methods in the study of language and of placenames. Funded from March to November 2011 by JISC (Joint Information Systems Network), it is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow Enroller Project, Scottish Language Dictionaries and the Scottish Place-Name Society. The project aims to engage the public in an exploration of language use in present-day Scotland, focusing on the Scots vernacular.

From Speech to Naming in a Scottish Pakistani Community: The Interplay between Language, Ethnicity and Identity

While the increasing ethnic minority population in the UK has raised awareness in sociolinguistics of the influence of ethnicity on identity (e.g. Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen 2011), very little research has been conducted into non-white ethnic minorities in Scotland, an area which is demographically very different from the rest of the United Kingdom. In addressing this gap in the literature, this chapter examines two aspects of language, speech and naming, in a Scottish Pakistani community in Glasgow. Phonology and naming are complementary because they span the fine-grained level in speech at one end, to the broader cultural level in naming at the other. Although it is necessary that both these systems must behave differently, we can explore whether they might exhibit functional similarities within the same ethnic minority community. By analysing this community from both a sociophonetic and socio-onomastic perspective, we aim to describe their linguistic practices and show how these practices may have been affected by cultural contact. More specifically, we examine how phonetic realisation and personal naming practices might relate to the formation of a potentially hybrid identity in the Glasgow Pakistani community.

Personal naming and society: a comparative study of disparate communities

There are multifarious connections between personal names and the societies in which they are bestowed and used. This paper reports on a project which investigated personal naming systems (both official and unofficial) in several present-day communities in Scotland with differing social and linguistic features. The project investigated practices in five communities which range from: rural to urban, multilingual to monolingual, close-knit to loose-knit, indigenous to immigrant. The data were collected through extensive semistructured interviews in each community alongside a degree of participant-observation. The project had a socioonomastic focus: to examine links between personal names and society. A comparative approach allows for conclusions broader than simply how official and unofficial names were used over generations within one community it produces a spread of data spanning space and (micro-)culture. This permits tentative conclusions regarding the effect of social factors such as social structure and cultural and linguistic contact.

Naming and Transplanted Traditions: Change and Continuity in Glasgow's Pakistani Muslim Community

If the premise is assumed that naming practices are dependent on the society and culture in which they occur, an intriguing question arises: what happens to these naming practices when they are transplanted into another society with its own naming traditions? Are the distinct naming practices lost as their users assimilate into another culture? Do they continue intact? Or do they evolve in conjunction with the new situation? This article investigates these questions directly through an analysis of naming practices within the Pakistani Muslim community in Glasgow. Specifically, it considers all aspects of naming in this community and relates them to how and whether name usage has changed as a result of migration.