- blog on e-Onomastics - digital onomastics - e-Science about proper names
- blogue sur e-Onomastique - onomastique numérique - e-Science sur les noms propres
- Blog über e-Onomastik - digitale Onomastik - e-Wissenschaft über die Namenkunde
- блог по oномастике
Lisa Spira is the director of research and product development at Ethnic Technologies. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times
Lisa Spira, 30, is director of research and product development at Ethnic Technologies in South Hackensack, N.J.
Q. What is your educational background?
A. My degree from Syracuse University was in linguistics. I studied a branch of linguistics called onomastics, which involves the history and origin of proper names. In my field I am known as an onomastician.
Have you always been fascinated with names?
Yes. After my sister was born, I took my parents’ baby-naming book and never gave it back. I even added new names. I had Playmobil toys with about 150 plastic people. Not only did I name every one, but I also gave them name tags.
What do you do at Ethnic Technologies?
I lead a team that develops our software that predicts individuals’ ethnic origins based on their full names, addresses and ZIP codes. We build predictive algorithms based on patterns in names from various ethnic groups. We also track demographic data that pinpoints ethnic breakdowns by geography. We identify 158 distinct ethnicities, with further segmentation for Hispanics and African-Americans.
Can you give an example of how your company’s software works?
Let’s hypothetically take the name of an American: Yeimary Moran. We see the common name Mary inside her first name, but unlike the name Rosemary, for example, we know that the letter string “eimary” is Hispanic. Her surname could be Irish or Hispanic. So then we look at where our Yeimary Moran lives, which is Miami. From our software, we discover that her neighborhood is more Hispanic than Irish. Customer testing and feedback show that our software is over 90 percent accurate in most ethnicities, so we can safely deduce that this Yeimary Moran is Hispanic.
What types of companies come to you for your services?
Any company that wants to target its goods or services to a particular ethnic group. A perfect example is cosmetics. African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and Caucasians may prefer different cosmetics.
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What if companies want to target ethnic groups for the wrong reason?
We vet every potential client to make sure it is reputable. We work hard to make sure clients don’t have suspicious motivations for using this information. Our contracts specify allowable uses.
Characters from the Golden Girls? Not necessarily.
Eunice peaked in popularity in the United States in 1908 at #106 and for the next 30 years, it remained in the top 200 baby names given to girls. Many of Eunice’s contemporaries such as Nora and Evelyn are returning with the new generation of baby girls, but we don’t imagine a Eunice seated in a classroom of colorful plastic chairs. Names ebb and flow throughout time. But many transition between people in less intuitive ways.
The Younger Generation of Eunices
In fact, you might meet Eunice today at a college party or an early professionals networking event.
She is most likely to be Eunice Park or Eunice Choi or Eunice Yeung. She’s embarking on a successful career following a rigorous education. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Korea or China.
She might also be Eunice Washington or Eunice Thomas. She exists in the same cosmopolitan circles as Eunice Park, but her history or that of her parents or of generations before is African.
Onomastic Fluidity and Ethnicity
These Eunices exemplify the unexpected fluidity of names. A Eunice Park or Eunice Washington seems to be the exception, a girl unfortunately burdened with a name from another generation. But upon further reflection, in her own culture, her name isn’t an oddity but one of many similar names. Names move across age, education level, social sphere, geographies, and ethnicities.
These nuances contribute to the ethnic understanding inherent in names.
At Ethnic Technologies, we design a software product that relies on names to predict the ethnicities of individuals. The software algorithms combine all the name intelligence (first name, middle name, surname) with geographical intelligence from our Enhanced Neighborhood Analytics. But the research behind the names, name patterns, and software logic includes crosscultural research. In order to predict ethnicity onomastically, we research how names move through time, geography, and culture.
Understanding the Diversity in Eunice
Chinese and Korean immigrants to the United States value education, advancement, family, and respect of elders. Many parents choose to give their new baby an American name to help her assimilate and achieve success. But they choose this American name from their successful or influential peers, or even a respected member of their parents’ generation. If Eunice is a respected, accomplished caucasian American woman of an older generation, it is name that embodies their hopes for this new baby girl.
African American parents also follow predictable patterns, although different ones from their Asian American counterparts. They conform to the prevalent sound patterns in their community while continually seeking individualism. We don’t blink an eye when introduced to a young African American woman named Shalice, LaTrice, or Chaneese. While the spelling and capitalization may differ, the harmonious sounds remain constant. It is irrelevant whether her parents saw Eunice as an entirely new name or as the novelty of established name of generations past. Eunice Washington has a name that is her own variation on a familiar theme.
Onomastics, Ethnicity and the Future
Each culture appropriates names from other cultures while conforming to its own trends, those derived from cultural values. In a country of immigrants as diverse as the United States, names reliably predict ethnicity, as long as we understand the diversity of contexts in which they may be situated. As the world shrinks, through improved communication and travel technologies, names will ebb and flow according to more complex patterns. Embracing multicultural diversity only enhances our understanding of individuals through their names and names through their bearers.
Is Gladys only a Golden Girl?
We wouldn’t lean too heavily on that assumption, given that the name peaked in 1901 at #11 and declined sharply after 1908. Instead we’ll rely on cultural insights to predict something else entirely. Gladys Fernandez and Gladys Torres are the contemporaries of Eunice Park and Eunice Washington. But they come from different values and different stories.
Ethnic Technologies is the leading provider of multicultural marketing data, ethnic identification software and ethnic data appending services. Ethnic Technologies provides invaluable tools to customers in numerous marketing verticals.
