The newest issue of Beiträge zur Namenforschung could easily be introduced in the usual way: four new articles, a review section, and another substantial contribution to European name studies. But the first page of Volume 61 (2026), Issue 1–2 changes the perspective completely.
It carries a short contribution by Rita Heuser and Daniel Kroiß entitled “60 Jahre Beiträge zur Namenforschung. Neue Folge 1966–2025.” The journal has therefore reached a point at which a new issue invites not only reading but reflection. What has happened to Beiträge zur Namenforschung during these six decades? And what does its history tell us about the development of onomastics itself?
The answer is more interesting than a simple anniversary.
Sixty years - or rather seventy-seven?
Strictly speaking, Beiträge zur Namenforschung is considerably older than sixty.
The journal was founded in 1949 by the Indo-Europeanist and hydronymist Hans Krahe, in collaboration with Ernst Dickenmann. The original series continued through Volume 16 in 1965. In 1966 Rudolf Schützeichel established the Neue Folge, initially together with Ernst Dickenmann and Jürgen Untermann. Library catalogues preserve the sequence very clearly: 1949–1965 for the original series, followed by Neue Folge Volume 1 in 1966.
There is even a deeper prehistory.
Writing in the American journal Names in the 1950s, Madison S. Beeler described Beiträge zur Namenforschung as the foremost German periodical in the field and one of the leading European journals devoted to name studies. He also regarded it as, in a sense, the continuation of the earlier Zeitschrift für Ortsnamenforschung, founded in 1925 under Joseph Schnetz and renamed Zeitschrift für Namenforschung in 1937 before publication ceased during the Second World War in 1943. So there are actually three possible anniversaries hidden inside the present one:
the institutional genealogy begins in 1925;
Beiträge zur Namenforschung itself begins in 1949;
the Neue Folge begins in 1966.
The sixty-year celebration therefore marks continuity within a much longer German tradition of professional onomastic publishing.
What did onomastics look like in 1966?
Opening the first volume of the Neue Folge is almost like opening a time capsule.
The first issue contained studies of early medieval Alsatian place names, ancient Danubian hydronymy, historical field names in the Palatinate, and the preparation of a historical dictionary of bynames and family names. Reviews covered Anatolian personal names, pre-Roman linguistic material, Latin cognomina, Rhaeto-Romance place names, German regional toponymy, Scandinavian names and historical family names.
The second issue ranged from Anatolian river names and Italic gentilicia to Baltic substrate research and Roman-road evidence obtained from field names.
This was recognizably the world of historical-philological onomastics.
Its central questions were often:
Where does a name come from?
What is its earliest attested form?
Which language created it?
What older word or personal name lies behind it?
Can names reveal extinct languages, settlement movements or ancient ethnic relations?
Place names, river names and early personal names were particularly valuable because they could preserve linguistic evidence older than surviving texts.
And yet Volume 1 also contained something that prevents us from caricaturing early BNF as merely an etymological journal. Odo Leys published “Der Eigenname in seinem formalen Verhältnis zum Appellativ”, a theoretical investigation of the formal relationship between proper names and common nouns. The article continued to be cited decades later in general linguistic discussions of properhood and noun grammar.
Theory was therefore present from the beginning - even if historical etymology remained dominant.
The first major expansion: from the origin of names to the use of names
By the 1980s one can already see the field changing.
A particularly revealing issue appeared in 1985. Alongside traditional studies of ancient names and Germanic anthroponymy stood Friedhelm Debus’s article “Zur Pragmatik von Namengebung und Namengebrauch in unserer Zeit” and Theodoros Radisoglou’s study of the first names of Greek children attending schools in Erlangen.
These titles represent an important shift.
The question was no longer only “Where did this name originate?” but also:
Why do people choose this name?
How is it used socially?
What happens to names in migration?
How do bilingual communities manage personal names?
What does a name communicate about its bearer and about the person using it?
Historical onomastics was beginning to coexist with what we would now call socio-onomastics, pragmatics and variationist name studies.
This development did not replace philology. Even the 1986 volume contained Germanic personal-name morphology, early medieval evidence and historical place-name studies alongside an investigation of contemporary first-name choices in Flintbek between 1972 and 1984.
That coexistence would become one of the journal’s defining characteristics.
A journal that never abandoned historical depth
There is an interesting continuity in Beiträge zur Namenforschung that distinguishes it from journals that reinvent themselves by leaving earlier methods behind.
BNF never abandoned etymology, historical linguistics, philology, hydronymy or settlement-name research.
The 1994/95 volume, published during an editorial transition after Rudolf Schützeichel, still contained work on ancient Hispano-Celtic divine names, Galician pre-Roman toponyms, German-Slavic contact, Celtic river names, Gothic personal names and historical surname formation.
Even today such work remains part of the journal.
This matters because historical name research performs a function that few other branches of linguistics can replace. Names often preserve archaic lexical material, old phonological forms and evidence of language contact that ordinary vocabulary has lost. The continuing presence of this tradition gives BNF considerable diachronic depth.
But the journal gradually placed that historical core alongside an expanding understanding of what counts as an onomastic object.
From rivers and settlements to dogs, cats, licence plates and hair salons
Perhaps the most visible transformation concerns the classes of names considered worthy of serious study.
Earlier European name research was heavily concentrated on anthroponyms and toponyms, and within toponymy especially on old settlement names and hydronyms.
Modern BNF is strikingly different.
A 2012 issue, for example, combined current German surname research with a study of the changing structure of dog names, alongside traditional work on historical place names and Indo-European etymology.
In 2014 Rita Heuser and Mirjam Schmuck reported on the Digital Dictionary of Surnames in Germany, while another article examined personalized vehicle registration plates in Siegen-Wittgenstein.
Then came perhaps the clearest symbolic break with the traditional hierarchy of name classes.
The entire fiftieth volume in 2015 was devoted to zoonyms.
Two double issues examined names of pets and livestock. Dogs, cats, rabbits, cattle, circus animals and laboratory animals became objects of systematic onomastic analysis. The geographical range stretched from Scandinavia and Finland to Ancient Egypt and southern Africa; Adrian Koopman contributed a study of Zulu cattle names. Researchers examined naming motivation, morphology, pragmatics, human-animal relationships and differences between official and unofficial animal names.
Fifty years earlier it would have been difficult to imagine a whole BNF volume structured around cats, rabbits and laboratory animals.
Yet that development does not represent a decline in scholarly seriousness. It represents an enlarged understanding of naming itself.
If humans individualize an animal by naming it, the process tells us something about grammar, categorization, affection, social relations, anthropomorphism and the distinction between individual and category.
The object changed; the linguistic question remained serious.
The digital turn
A second transformation is methodological.
The first volumes relied overwhelmingly on charters, historical documents, dictionaries, maps and philological reconstruction.
Those materials remain indispensable, but contemporary BNF increasingly reflects the digitalization of onomastic evidence.
The 2014 article on the Digital Dictionary of Surnames in Germany is a good example. It links traditional family-name etymology to large databases and geographically distributed surname evidence.
The newest issue takes this further.
Rolf Bergmann’s 145-page study “Transparenz und Opakheit deutscher Ortsnamen” is based on a cleaned corpus of 3,035 German place names. Instead of examining a handful of difficult etymologies, the study quantifies morphological patterns across an entire dataset: 61.3% of the names are compounds, 30.0% suffix formations and 8.7% simple forms. Transparency and opacity can therefore be investigated statistically rather than only impressionistically.
This is a significant methodological evolution.
The journal that once printed hand-produced maps of medieval name distributions now also publishes corpus-based quantitative onomastics.
And importantly, one has not displaced the other.
Names enter everyday conversation
The current issue provides perhaps the best illustration of how far the disciplinary horizon has expanded.
Pepe Droste’s article examines names in their “natural habitat”: face-to-face interaction.
Rather than treating names primarily as entries in dictionaries or historical documents, the study asks what happens when one person actually addresses another by name. Its evidence comes from extensive recordings of non-elicited everyday interaction and takes into account turn position, conversational sequence and multimodal context.
This is very far from traditional Ortsnamenforschung.
It belongs to interactional linguistics, pragmatics and multimodal conversation analysis.
And yet its central object is still the proper name.
That is perhaps the strongest evidence of BNF’s evolution: the journal has moved from studying primarily the history of name forms to studying increasingly the life of names in communication.
Names, power and politics
Another area that has become increasingly prominent is the relationship between naming and social power.
Volume 60 (2025) included the thematic issue “Namen und Politik”, edited by Miriam Lind, Daniel Kroiß and Lena Späth. Its articles dealt with first-name regulation, political influences on naming among German communities in Brazil, names as ethnic markers in the housing market, marital naming law and other forms of politically conditioned naming.
This would have been peripheral to the journal’s agenda in 1966. Today it is central to some of the most dynamic areas of socio-onomastics.
The current 2026 issue continues this direction in a particularly striking article by Luca Winklmüller on Namenspott and mocking names as forms of onymic aggression.
The study uses 214 examples from the German political satire programme heute show as well as material from the DWDS WebXL corpus. Its theoretical starting point is that a personal name is intimately connected with social identity, making deformation or hostile renaming a potentially powerful form of symbolic aggression.
Here names are not remnants of linguistic prehistory.
They are instruments of power.
That shift mirrors one of the broader developments in modern onomastics: names are increasingly studied not merely for what they mean historically, but for what people do with them.
The special issue as a sign of disciplinary maturity
Another revealing change has been the increasing use of thematic issues.
Recent volumes include Personennamen in Bewegung / Anthroponyms in Motion (2021), Werbende Namen (2022), Referenz auf Personen in Variation(en) (2023), Personal Names and Naming across Europe (2023/24), and Namen und Politik (2025).
This format allows BNF to function as more than a repository for unrelated individual articles.
The journal increasingly becomes a place in which a specific emerging subfield can be mapped collectively: migration, advertising, political naming, variation in personal reference, animal naming. These subjects reveal a discipline that has moved decisively beyond a narrow division between anthroponymy and toponymy.
An international journal - but still recognizably Central European
BNF describes itself as an international interdisciplinary journal of name studies open to personal names, animal names, geographical names, event names, product names and other name classes from all languages, areas and periods. At the same time, it explicitly acknowledges that the languages and names of Central Europe remain its principal focus. The current publication languages are German and English.
That balance is worth preserving.
Internationalization does not necessarily require abandoning a journal’s intellectual geography.
Historically, BNF’s strength has rested precisely in the extraordinarily rich German-speaking tradition of historical name research and in its connections with Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic and Indo-European studies.
At the same time, its pages have long contained work from outside Germany. Even the early supplements included studies of Roman Dalmatia, Asia Minor, Slavonic hydronymy, Turkish place names and Greek personal names in Iberia. The 2015 zoonym volume included Scandinavian, Finnish, Zulu and Egyptian material.
The journal therefore became international without becoming placeless.
The often forgotten importance of the Beihefte
The influence of Beiträge zur Namenforschung cannot be measured only through the journal volumes.
Beginning in 1969, the Beihefte zur Beiträge zur Namenforschung created an additional publishing infrastructure for substantial monographs, bibliographies and conference proceedings.
The series eventually reached 52 supplements and included works that became important reference points in different branches of name studies: Géza Alföldy on personal names in Roman Dalmatia, Albrecht Greule on early hydronymy of the Upper Rhine, Jürgen Udolph on Slavic river names, Ladislav Zgusta on Asia Minor place names, Wolfgang Laur’s Der Name, Klaas Willems’s Eigenname und Bedeutung, studies of language contact, literary onomastics, medieval documentary evidence, surname history and many others.
The journal therefore did more than publish research.
It helped create an onomastic scholarly infrastructure.
That may ultimately be a more meaningful form of impact than a citation metric.
What does “impact” mean for a journal like BNF?
In the sciences, journal influence is often reduced to citation-based indicators.
That is a poor measure for understanding the historical role of a specialized humanities journal.
BNF’s impact can be seen elsewhere.
It provided a durable publication venue when professional name studies represented a relatively small scholarly community. It maintained continuity between historical linguistics, dialectology, philology, geography and later sociolinguistics. It published major scholarly debates. Its review section documented the development of international name research. Its supplements offered space for monographs and conference proceedings. And it allowed new objects and methods to enter the discipline without abandoning the philological expertise on which German Namenforschung had been built.
The American Name Society still lists Beiträge zur Namenforschung among Germany’s specialist onomastic journals, while bibliographic systems such as WorldCat, ISSN and OpenAlex record its continuing international presence.
There is also a symbolic form of impact.
When Madison Beeler surveyed the first four volumes for Names in the 1950s, he presented BNF to American readers as one of Europe’s leading journals in the field. More than seventy years later, the journal is still publishing.
Few specialist humanities journals can claim such continuity.
From Katerloch to onymic aggression
One way to understand sixty years of the Neue Folge is simply to compare titles.
In 1966 Ernst Christmann wrote about the historical field names Katerloch, Ketterich and Kiderich in the Palatinate.
In 2026 Luca Winklmüller writes about onymic aggression in political satire, Pepe Droste about proper names in naturally occurring face-to-face interaction, Rolf Bergmann about the transparency of 3,035 place names in a quantitative corpus, and Jonathan Stumpf proposes a typology of names of ancient statues as ergonyms.
That comparison summarizes the transformation beautifully.
The journal still contains history, etymology and toponymy.
But around that historical core has grown an extraordinarily broad conception of what a name is and what name research can investigate.
The newest issue: a miniature history of the journal
The current Volume 61 (2026), Issue 1–2 almost seems designed to demonstrate this continuity.
It begins with the anniversary note itself. It also contains a memorial notice for Kirstin Casemir, who had been part of the journal’s editorial generation and died in May 2026. The four research articles then move between socio-onomastics, interactional pragmatics, corpus-based toponomastics and ergonymy.
In other words, the issue contains both the old BNF and the new one.
Bergmann’s place-name study belongs recognizably to the journal’s deep tradition of German toponymy, but its corpus methodology is contemporary.
Winklmüller and Droste address questions that would barely have appeared in the journal’s first volumes: power, identity, conversational interaction and naturally occurring speech.
Stumpf extends the inventory of name classes yet again by treating ancient statue names systematically as ergonyms.
The anniversary is therefore not simply ceremonial.
The issue itself demonstrates what sixty years of methodological expansion have produced.
Continuity may be BNF’s greatest achievement
Academic disciplines often tell their history as a sequence of methodological revolutions: one paradigm replaces another, and older work becomes obsolete.
The history of Beiträge zur Namenforschung suggests something more interesting.
Historical philology did not disappear when sociolinguistics arrived.
Etymology did not disappear when pragmatics arrived.
Toponymy did not disappear when commercial names, animal names or political naming became legitimate subjects.
Close reading of medieval documents did not disappear when corpora and digital databases became available.
Instead, the journal gradually added layers.
That may be its most important contribution.
Modern onomastics needs both the scholar who can interpret an eleventh-century documentary form and the scholar who can analyse millions of surname records; both the etymologist reconstructing an ancient hydronym and the interactional linguist observing how someone uses a first name during disagreement; both historical naming systems and contemporary struggles over identity and power.
BNF has increasingly become a place where these traditions can coexist.
Sixty years - and still changing
The phrase “60 Jahre Beiträge zur Namenforschung” therefore understates the story.
The Neue Folge has completed sixty years.
The journal title has existed since 1949.
Its scholarly ancestry reaches back at least to 1925.
And the latest issue shows no sign of a journal simply preserving its past.
Publication itself has changed as well. The journal now has an online edition with its own ISSN, current articles receive DOIs and bilingual German-English abstracts, and the digital archive on the Winter platform extends back to Volume 47 (2012). After decades of quarterly publication, it now appears in two double issues annually.
There is also a visible generational transition. The 2026 anniversary note is signed by Rita Heuser and Daniel Kroiß, while the current editorial structure brings together established figures and a newer generation of researchers. That continuity matters for a specialist field whose institutional presence at universities has never been guaranteed.
For me, that may be the most convincing measure of the journal’s success.
A scholarly periodical founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, itself rooted in an earlier interwar tradition, has survived long enough to publish research based on digital corpora, multimodal interaction, political discourse and new classes of names - without losing the historical and philological expertise that originally justified its existence.
That is not simply longevity.
It is disciplinary memory combined with the ability to change.
And perhaps that is why the new issue deserves more than a routine announcement.
Happy 60th anniversary to the Neue Folge of Beiträge zur Namenforschung - and, in a broader sense, congratulations to a journal that has helped document and shape almost eight decades of modern onomastics.
The current issue
Beiträge zur Namenforschung, Neue Folge, Vol. 61 (2026), Issue 1–2, Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg.
It contains Rita Heuser and Daniel Kroiß’s anniversary note, Rolf Bergmann’s obituary for Kirstin Casemir, and research articles by Luca Winklmüller, Pepe Droste, Rolf Bergmann and Jonathan Stumpf.
