SNSBI Essay Prize 2025: Street Names, Heritage, and Bilingual Urban Memory

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 The Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland has announced two joint winners of the 2025 SNSBI Essay Prize. Congratulations go to Alina Brust of the University of Glasgow for “Reflections of Gaelic Heritage in the Street Names of Girvan” and Xiang Lin of The University of Edinburgh for “Structure and Formation of bilingual Hong Kong street-names.”

The prize recognises emerging work in name studies, a field that connects language, history, geography, identity, and cultural memory. This is very much in line with SNSBI’s broader mission: the Society, founded in 1991, promotes the study of place-names, personal names, and other names, and brings together both academic researchers and wider name enthusiasts.

What is especially striking about the 2025 result is that both winning essays focus on street names. This is no coincidence. Street names are among the most visible forms of everyday onomastics. They appear on signs, maps, addresses, official documents, and digital navigation systems. Yet they also preserve older layers of language, power, settlement, memory, and identity.

Alina Brust’s essay on Gaelic heritage in the street names of Girvan points to an important question in Scottish toponymy: how do urban and local names reflect older linguistic landscapes? Scottish Gaelic is no longer dominant in much of lowland or south-western Scotland, but Gaelic and Celtic elements can remain embedded in place-names long after everyday language use has shifted. Modern Gaelic place-name work also shows how Gaelic forms continue to matter in contemporary naming practice, including the creation of new Gaelic street names where appropriate. Historical sources such as the Ayrshire Ordnance Survey Name Books are particularly valuable here, since they preserve nineteenth-century evidence for names in the parish of Girvan and their local interpretation.

Xiang Lin’s essay on bilingual Hong Kong street-names opens a different but equally important onomastic world. Hong Kong’s street-name system is shaped by English and Chinese forms that do not always correspond in a simple one-to-one way. Recent research on Hong Kong street names has shown that English and Chinese names may have different semantic origins; for example, one official form may refer to a structure or colonial figure, while the other encodes a local descriptive or cultural meaning. This makes Hong Kong a particularly rich case for studying bilingual naming, translation, colonial history, urban planning, and linguistic landscape.

Together, the two prize-winning essays demonstrate the strength of contemporary student research in onomastics. One looks at the traces of Gaelic heritage in a Scottish town; the other examines the structure of bilingual naming in one of the world’s most complex urban landscapes. Both remind us that street names are never merely practical labels. They are small public texts through which communities organise space, remember the past, negotiate identity, and make language visible.

The SNSBI Essay Prize has previously recognised work on topics such as suburban house signs, Anglo-Saxon personal names, public-house names, and the street names of St Andrews, showing the wide range of subjects that can be approached through name studies. The 2025 joint winners continue this tradition beautifully: they show that even the names we pass every day can tell larger stories about heritage, bilingualism, and the cultural life of places.

Congratulations to Alina Brust and Xiang Lin on their joint success in the 2025 SNSBI Essay Prize.