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Personal names among the Igbo people of South-eastern Nigeria can also be understood and contextualized within the fringes of their cultural values, worldviews, emotions, and economic resources. This article explores the conceptualization of wealth in Igbo personal naming practices from an ethnopragmatic paradigm, which uncovers the hidden meanings underlying the interpretation of language. Drawing on ethnographic data sourced through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with 30 participants (name-bearers, givers, and users) in the eastern heartland of Owerri (Imo State) and Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, we contextualize the pattern of wealth-inspired names among the Igbo as symbolic capital aimed at securing the welfare and future life trajectories of their bearers. We conclude that the concept of wealth has an intrinsic value among the Igbo for social class distinction, and it is reinscribed in the onomastic system to reflect parental aspirations for enduring social status, positioning, and belonging in the institutionalized class system. In this way, Igbo personal names function as economic resources for identity construction and social status classification. [Keywords: Personal names, wealth, ethnopragmatics, cultural identity, Igbo]

On June 17, 2010, representatives of the Indigenous Haida Nation held a ceremony to formally return the “Queen Charlotte Islands,” a name that had been colonially imposed on Haida Gwaii, their ancestral homeland and sovereign territory since the nineteenth century. This ceremonial return is analyzed as a process through which the Haida Nation can incorporate settler governance into a regime of respectful relations that functions on Haida terms. Framed simultaneously as the rejection of an unacceptable imposition and a respectful act of relationality in its own right, the ceremony offers a searing critique of colonial domination and invites settler powers into an alternative modality of relationship based in mutual understanding and respect. Through this process, I argue, the Haida Nation constitutes itself concurrently as a particular kind of political entity with clear traditional antecedents and essentially equal—if not superior—relationships with foreign governing powers.

Proponents of the predicate view of names explain the reference of an occurrence of a name N by invoking the property of bearing N. They avoid the charge that this view involves a vicious circularity by claiming that bearing N is not itself to be understood in terms of the reference of actual or possible occurrences of N. I argue that this approach is fundamentally mistaken. The phenomenon of 'reference transfer' shows that an individual can come to bear a name in virtue of the referential practices of a group of speakers. I develop a picture of name-bearing which captures this fact by treating the extension of name as a function of the way that extension is represented in the presuppositions of groups of speakers. I show that though there is a form of circularity inherent in this approach, it is not vicious circularity.

The nature of the eponymous hero of Beowulf has long been disputed. Was he drawn from the stock of traditional heroes or was he the poet's invention? So far, answers to this question have been given on exclusively literary-critical rather than onomastic grounds. This article argues that the usage of the name 'Biuuulf' (Beowulf) in the seventh century suggests that legends of Beowulf existed well before the composition of our extant poem. Considered in the immediate context of the Liber Vitae Dunelmensis in which it appears, the name 'Biuuulf' can be seen to conform to a recognizable pattern: it is one of several names containing words uncommon in or foreign to the Anglo-Saxon onomasticon, which appear to have been used due to familiarity with heroic-legendary traditions. Names like Ætla, Offa, Hama, Ingeld, Theodric, and Wyrmhere deviate from statistically demonstrable name-giving trends; so does the name Beowulf. These names were likely given in accordance with a custom, previously adumbrated by H. M. Chadwick and Patrick Wormald, in which children were named after characters from heroic legend. I conclude that the monk named Beowulf was named after the same traditional hero whom a later poet placed at the center of a heroic-elegiac masterpiece.