Call for Papers: Names and Naming in Contact Situations

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A new Special Issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778) invites contributions exploring names and naming practices in multilingual, multicultural, diasporic, and transnational contexts. The Special Issue, entitled “Names and Naming in Contact Situations,” is guest edited by Dr. Maryann Parada of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at California State University Bakersfield.

Names are more than linguistic labels: they are important social and cultural resources through which individuals and communities negotiate identity, belonging, memory, power, and place. The Special Issue seeks to advance socio-onomastic research into the social dimensions of personal names, place names, and naming practices, particularly where languages, cultures, populations, and identities come into contact.

The call brings together several rapidly developing areas of contemporary onomastics. These include critical toponymy and linguistic landscapes, personal naming in diasporic and minority communities, language contact and migration, naming and decolonization, heritage-language maintenance, digital anthroponymy, and the transformation of names across languages and writing systems. Comparative and longitudinal research is particularly encouraged.

Possible topics include:

• personal and place naming among minority and heritage-language communities;

• names and identity construction in diasporic settings;

• place names, linguistic landscapes, and toponymic politics;

• intersections between anthroponymy and toponymy;

• naming and language revitalization;

• Indigenous naming and decolonial approaches;

• ethnonyms and their perception and variation;

• adaptation and change of names across languages and scripts;

• names in relation to ethnicity, gender, religion, class, and social stratification;

• naming practices in borderlands and contact zones;

• digital and social-media naming;

• commemorative naming and collective memory;

• names and language pedagogy;

• methodological innovations in socio-onomastics;

• interdisciplinary approaches connecting onomastics with sociolinguistics, anthropology, geography, history, and cultural studies.

Contributions dealing with Hispanic personal and place names in minority and diasporic settings are particularly welcome, although the scope of the issue is substantially broader and embraces different linguistic and cultural contact situations.

How to propose a contribution

Prospective authors are invited to send a proposed title and an abstract of 200–250 words outlining their planned contribution. Proposals may be sent to Guest Editor Dr. Maryann Parada at mparada1@csub.edu or to the Genealogy editorial office at genealogy@mdpi.com. The abstracts will first be assessed for their fit with the Special Issue, while full manuscripts will undergo double-anonymized peer review.

Deadline for full manuscript submissions: 15 February 2027.

Research articles, review articles, and short communications are welcome. Papers accepted for publication will appear online continuously and will also be collected on the Special Issue webpage.

As Genealogy is an open-access MDPI journal, an Article Processing Charge of CHF 1,400 applies to accepted manuscripts.

The Special Issue offers a particularly interesting venue for scholars working at the intersection of onomastics, migration studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscapes, identity research, heritage studies, and language contact, and provides an opportunity to examine how names change, survive, compete, and acquire new meanings when people, languages, and cultures meet.