Percentages of medieval nicknames and diminutives across different geographical areas

https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/you-want-nicknames-we-got-nicknames/

In dictionary entries, the DMNES researchers sort our citations by modern day country borders (because trying to ascertain which country certain towns were in at which period is quite a bit of work — especially when ‘country’ isn’t a viable geographic category for much of the Middle Ages!). One particularly interesting aspect of the multi-cultural/cross-geographic data that they have is that it allows them to trace certain patterns or trends across these boundaries, and one such pattern is the prolificness (or not) of diminutives. The DMNES researchers touched on this in the previous post when they briefly commented on the percentage of names that are diminutives in any given era. In this post, they thought they’d explore this further, with some stats and some bar graphs; it’s been too long since they’ve had a nice graph!

TABLE OF DIMINUTIVE NUMBERS AND PERCENTAGES

Country	No. of dims.	No. of non-dims.	Percentage
Austria	0	60	0%
Brabant	18	191	8.6%
Czech Republic	241	912	18.5%
England	554	15457	3.4%
Estonia	612	905	40.3%
Finland	58	205	22%
France	1181	11744	9.1%
Germany	153	3973	3.7%
Iceland	0	63	0%
Ireland	12	294	3.9%
Italy	525	2387	18%
Latvia	201	1079	15.7%
Malta	0	10	0%
The Netherlands	36	862	4%
Norway	0	3	0%
Poland	21	123	14.5%
Portugal	2	384	.5%
Scotland	47	824	5.3%
Spain	62	1556	3.8%
Sweden	27	589	4.3%
Switzerland	102	543	15.8%
Ukraine	6	82	6.8%
Wales	46	391	10.5%

In some contexts, it is clear that they don’t have enough data to draw any sort of robust conclusions — Austria, Iceland, Malta, Norway, the Ukraine. But omitting these from discussion (and also omitting England, second from the bottom, and France, no. 8, since their much larger numbers make the graph inelegant), they are left with an interesting picture of the relative percentages of nicknames and diminutives across different geographical areas:

The four outstanding areas are Estonia, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Italy. The DMNES researchers have already discussed the nicknames in Estonia and the Czech Republic when they covered German and Slavic forms; so next up, they will explore diminutive and nicknames forms in Finland and Italy.