Today, 5 November 2026, one of the longest-running collaborative projects in European onomastics reaches its formal conclusion. At the University of Oviedo, the final day of the XLIV International Congress of Asturian Philology and Culture (CIFCA) is devoted to the closing of Patronymica Romanica (PatRom) and to the presentation of the last part of its monumental Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane.
The occasion marks the end of approximately four decades of collaborative research into the historical anthroponymy of the Romance-speaking world. The official CIFCA programme describes the event explicitly as the Piesllu del proyeutu PatRom - the closing of the PatRom project - and stresses the important role played by the University of Oviedo and the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana throughout its history. The three scholars most closely associated with the final dictionary - Dieter Kremer, Jean Germain, and Ana María Cano González - are together in Oviedo for the conclusion. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate place for PatRom to finish.
It began in Trier in 1987
PatRom was conceived in 1986–1987 at the University of Trier under the direction of Dieter Kremer. Its decisive starting point was the first international PatRom colloquium, held in Trier on 10–13 December 1987. Gérard Taverdet later recalled how Kremer brought together scholars who had largely been studying the anthroponymy of their own countries and linguistic regions and challenged them to imagine a single comparative project covering the Romance world.
The initial title was Dictionnaire historique des noms de famille romans. The ambition was enormous: instead of producing another national surname dictionary, PatRom would reconstruct the shared historical foundations of Romance anthroponymy.
By 1997, when the project published its major methodological presentation volume, PatRom comprised 18 research groups from the Romance countries of Europe together with the coordinating centre at Trier. The original expectation had been that the dictionary might be completed around the year 2000. It took considerably longer. But this delay is also a measure of what PatRom attempted.
Not an ordinary surname dictionary
The most important thing to understand about PatRom is that it is not simply an alphabetical dictionary of surnames. Its organising principle is genetic and historical. The dictionary begins with an etymon, usually a Latin or inherited Romance lexical item, and follows the personal names and surnames that developed from it across different Romance languages and regions.
In this respect, PatRom deliberately adopted the intellectual architecture of the great Romance etymological dictionaries such as the Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (REW), the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW), and the Lessico Etimologico Italiano (LEI). Jean Germain describes the project as a form of European onomastic lexicography, combining onomastics, historical linguistics and lexicology.
A PatRom article therefore asks more than: What does this surname mean? It asks:
From which lexical etymon did this anthroponymic family develop? When do its forms first appear? How did they change phonologically and morphologically? In which Romance regions do they occur? How are the medieval forms related to modern surnames?
That shift in perspective was fundamental. The 1997 presentation volume, for example, showed how one historical lexical base could generate a network of forms across different Romance domains rather than a collection of isolated national surname entries.
Historical documents meet modern surname geography
Another major innovation was methodological. PatRom combined two kinds of evidence.
The first was historical: medieval and early modern documents containing named individuals - tax registers, censuses, charters, necrologies, population lists and similar sources.
The second was contemporary: modern inventories of surnames, electoral registers, telephone data and national population records that made it possible to study geographical distribution.
This combination allowed researchers to move from the medieval nickname or descriptive designation to its later surname descendants while also considering their modern geography. The scale of the documentation was remarkable for a project conceived before the modern digital-humanities era.
The archived PatRom documentation records around 170,000 historical entries at the Oviedo centre alone. Louvain had approximately 140,000 entries, alongside access to Belgium's complete national surname inventory. Madrid worked with an official register containing more than six million individuals, while other centres used regional electoral lists and historical corpora.
In retrospect, PatRom looks strikingly modern.
Long before “big data” became a normal phrase in humanities research, its scholars were already combining digitised historical records, present-day surname distributions, regional databases, cartography and comparative linguistic analysis.
A genuinely European network
The organisational structure was equally ambitious.
At different stages, institutions involved in PatRom included centres in Lisbon, Santiago de Compostela, Oviedo, Santander, Madrid, Seville, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, Nancy, Louvain-la-Neuve, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Udine, Bucharest, Chișinău and Trier, together with independent collaborators elsewhere in Europe and North America.
This was not simply international cooperation in the superficial sense of contributors sending chapters to an editor. Each centre was responsible for historical documentation, regional linguistic expertise, modern surname evidence and eventually regional syntheses. These were then brought together by pan-Romance editors, who had to resolve discrepancies between regional analyses and construct a coherent account for the whole Romance territory.
The project was therefore both decentralised and highly standardised. Individual centres retained the expertise necessary to interpret their own linguistic territories, while the dictionary imposed common principles of transcription, classification, citation, morphology and etymological argumentation. That balance may be one of PatRom’s most important methodological legacies.
Trier, Louvain and Oviedo
Although PatRom involved many centres, three places became particularly important to its long-term coordination.
Trier, through Dieter Kremer, was the initiating centre and remained responsible for general coordination, editorial work and much of the pan-Romance material.
Louvain-la-Neuve, represented especially by Jean Germain, became crucial for Galloromance synthesis, historical documentation, bibliography and cartography.
And Oviedo, under Ana María Cano González, gradually assumed a central coordinating and secretarial role. The Asturian centre carried out extensive historical data collection, regional synthesis and cartographic work and organised the IX PatRom Colloquium in Oviedo in 1995.
Cano had directed the Oviedo PatRom centre from 1991 and joined Kremer and Germain in the project's Bureau in 1995. The three subsequently became the principal editors through whom the published Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane is best known. The decision to bring the project formally to an end in Oviedo is therefore deeply symbolic.
What PatRom deliberately did not attempt
One of PatRom’s strengths was also its willingness to define limits. The project did not try to explain every surname found anywhere in the Romance-speaking world. Its central concern was anthroponyms of lexical origin - names derived from elements of ordinary vocabulary that had become personal designations and, eventually, hereditary surnames. Names derived directly from geographical names or from baptismal/given names were largely outside the principal lexicographical programme. Moreover, an etymon generally had to demonstrate anthroponymic productivity across more than one major Romance domain to justify pan-Romance treatment. The project distinguished four broad areas: Iberoromania, Galloromania, Italoromania and Romanian.
The publishers themselves acknowledge that not every etymon originally envisaged could ultimately be treated. That is important when evaluating the project. PatRom is monumental, but it was never intended to be an exhaustive census of every Romance surname. It is a comparative genetic dictionary of a selected pan-Romance anthroponymic core.
From body parts to wolves, bread and family relations
The published dictionary reflects that conceptual organisation.
The first major lexical volume, II/1 (2004), examined names connected with the human being and parts of the human body.
It was followed much later by II/2 (2018), devoted to additional body-related terms and to physical and moral characteristics.
The animal world occupies Volumes III/1 (2015) and III/2 (2020). Mammals came first, followed by birds, fish, reptiles and invertebrates. Here one encounters the lexical ancestors behind names associated with wolves, bears, lions, horses, cattle, birds, insects and many other animals. The 2015 volume alone contained 28 super-lemmas corresponding to 49 individual lemmas.
Volume IV/1 (2023) moved through several apparently disparate but anthroponymically productive semantic fields: colours, food, clothing, dates and festivals. Among its etyma are words corresponding to black, white, brown and red, as well as bread, flour, meat, pepper and items of clothing.
And now comes IV/2.
De Gruyter currently lists the volume as ahead of publication in 2026. It contains 36 super-lemmas corresponding to 55 individual lemmas and treats kinship relations, social relations, selected ethnic adjectives, several action verbs, abstract concepts such as DIABOLUS and CARITAS, and three late articles.
This is the volume being presented today in Oviedo.
The closing day is itself a statement about PatRom
The programme for 5 November is remarkably appropriate.
At 16:30, Dieter Kremer speaks on:
“PatRom: lo que no se encuentra” — “PatRom: what cannot be found.”
That is an intriguing title with which to close a forty-year dictionary project. It turns attention not simply to achievements, but to gaps, limits and the methodological importance of knowing when the historical evidence does not permit an answer.
At 17:15, Jean Germain presents:
“Enseñances del proyeutu PatRom” - “Lessons from the PatRom project.”
Ana María Cano González then takes the audience back into the actual machinery of the dictionary with:
*HISPĀNIA, HISPĀNUS, HISPĀNIOLUS in the context of PatRom.
Finally, researchers who worked on PatRom in Asturias - Ramiro Javier Barcia López, Loreto Díaz Suárez, Xulio Viejo Fernández and Susana Villa Basalo - join Cano for a round table.
So the final afternoon does not merely celebrate the publication of a book. It asks what the project found, what it could not find, what researchers learned from it, and how its methods operated in practice. That seems an unusually fitting way to end PatRom.
PatRom changed more than one dictionary
Its wider impact is difficult to measure by citation counts alone. Jean Germain has described PatRom as one of the most ambitious projects in personal-name research of recent decades and, importantly, as a motor and catalyst for a field in which surname etymology had too often been vulnerable to poorly documented or amateur explanations.
Gérard Taverdet was similarly emphatic when the first main dictionary volume appeared in 2004: he regarded its publication as more than the appearance of another reference work and predicted that it would mark subsequent anthroponymic research. The reason lies in the method.
PatRom insisted that surname etymology must be based on: historical forms, regional linguistic competence, phonological plausibility, morphology, geographical distribution, modern evidence, and comparison across related languages. An attractive resemblance between a modern surname and a modern word was not enough. That principle sounds obvious today. In the late 1980s, applying it systematically across the whole Romance world was revolutionary in scale.
An entire library grew around the dictionary
The dictionary was only the visible centre of a much larger publication programme. The Patronymica Romanica series was established as the project's own scholarly publication organ for conference proceedings, monographs and onomastic source editions.
Its first volume, published in 1990, contained the proceedings of the founding Trier colloquium of December 1987. Other volumes opened major historical sources to anthroponymists: medieval population censuses from Navarre, fourteenth-century Barcelona tax lists, records from medieval Paris, and early anthroponymic documentation from Madeira.
Still others became substantial regional studies: Enzo Caffarelli's work on personal naming in Rome, Julio Viejo Fernández's study of medieval Asturian anthroponymy, Ana Isabel Boullón Agrelo's Antroponimia medieval galega, and Lidia Becker's Hispano-romanisches Namenbuch.
The series also absorbed wider onomastic work, including the multi-volume proceedings of the 1993 ICOS Congress in Trier and later books on Spanish toponymy and place-name standardisation. By 2020 the Leipzig Namenberatungsstelle counted 25 volumes in the accompanying Patronymica Romanica series. PatRom thus produced not one book but something closer to an anthroponymic research infrastructure.
Regional projects became part of the legacy
The influence spread further through publications produced by individual PatRom centres.
The Barcelona group produced the Repertori d’Antropònims Catalans. The Louvain centre was closely associated with Jules Herbillon and Jean Germain’s two-volume Dictionnaire des noms de famille en Belgique romane et dans les régions limitrophes. Regional studies appeared for Galicia, Asturias, Madeira, Rome and elsewhere.
This is another reason why it would be misleading to judge PatRom only by asking whether every originally planned dictionary lemma finally appeared. The project helped create corpora, bibliographies, doctoral research, regional dictionaries, source editions, conferences and personal networks that continued to generate scholarship independently of the central dictionary.
A project from another technological age
There is also something remarkable about PatRom from the perspective of 2026.
The project was conceived in 1987. The World Wide Web did not yet exist. There was no Google Books, no digitised national newspaper corpus, no massive searchable genealogical database, no GIS platform on a researcher's laptop, and certainly no machine-learning system capable of clustering millions of name variants. PatRom nevertheless set out to coordinate enormous quantities of historical and contemporary anthroponymic data across national borders.
Researchers had to identify sources, transcribe them, encode them, establish common abbreviations, negotiate common classifications and physically bring together national and regional expertise. The very slowness of the project reflects this historical context. Today we can query millions of names in seconds. PatRom reminds us that data availability is not the same as interpretation.
Its lasting lesson may be precisely that a historical name requires context: linguistic, chronological, geographical and documentary. Modern computational tools can accelerate the first stages of that process enormously. They do not abolish the need for the kind of philological judgement that PatRom spent four decades refining.
Not an ending, but a corpus of questions
The publisher's description of the dictionary once envisaged an additional supplementary volume that might draw together conclusions and indexes after the completion of the lexicographical series. Whether that plan will take a new form after today's official closure remains to be seen.
What is certain is that Volume IV/2 closes the principal lexicographical architecture of PatRom.
The project that began in Trier with a group of scholars wondering how the fragmented evidence of Romance surnames could possibly be brought together ends in Oviedo with a multi-volume dictionary, an extensive research series and a methodology that has entered the toolbox of Romance anthroponymy.
Forty years is an extraordinary lifespan for a collaborative humanities project. During that period institutions changed, technologies changed, generations of scholars changed, and some of PatRom’s founding and contributing figures did not live to see the final volume. Yet the project continued. Perhaps that perseverance is itself part of its scholarly message. Names survive because communities transmit them. And scholarship survives in much the same way: through transmission, revision, collaboration and the willingness of one generation to continue work begun by another.
Today in Oviedo, PatRom closes. Its influence on Romance name studies does not.
The Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane — principal volumes
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2004.
Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane. Patronymica Romanica (PatRom). Volume II/1: L’homme et les parties du corps humain (première partie). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2007.
Volume I/1: Introductions. Cahier des normes rédactionnelles. Morphologie. Bibliographies. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Cano González, Ana María & Claudia Maas-Chauveau, with the PatRom collective. 2010.
Volume I/2: Bibliographie des sources historiques. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2015.
Volume III/1: Les animaux. Première partie: Les mammifères. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2018.
Volume II/2: Les parties du corps humain. 2e partie: Les particularités physiques et morales. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2020.
Volume III/2: Les animaux. 2e partie: Les oiseaux, poissons et invertébrés. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2023.
Volume IV/1: Couleurs – Aliments et vêtements – Dates et fêtes. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Cano González, Ana María, Jean Germain & Dieter Kremer (eds.). 2026.
Volume IV/2: Les relations de parenté – les relations sociales – quelques ethniques – des verbes d’action – deux abstraits – trois articles tardifs. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Ahead of publication; presented at the closing of PatRom in Oviedo, 5 November 2026.
PatRom and the books around it - selected publications
Kremer, Dieter (ed.). 1990. Dictionnaire historique des noms de famille romans. Actes du Ier Colloque, Trèves, 10–13 décembre 1987. Patronymica Romanica 1.
Bourlet, Caroline & Lucie Fossier. 1991. Paris sous Philippe-le-Bel, including the 1292 Rôle de la Taille and its personal-name index. Patronymica Romanica 2.
Cierbide Martinena, Ricardo. 1993. Censos de población de la Baja Navarra (1350–1353 y 1412). Patronymica Romanica 7.
Caffarelli, Enzo. 1996. L’onomastica personale nella città di Roma dalla fine del secolo XIX ad oggi. Patronymica Romanica 8.
Kremer, Dieter & Claudia Maas-Chauveau. 1997. Dictionnaire historique de l’anthroponymie romane (PatRom): Présentation d’un projet. Patronymica Romanica 9.
Viejo Fernández, Julio. 1998. La onomástica asturiana bajomedieval: nombres de persona y procedimientos denominativos en Asturias durante los siglos XIII al XV. Patronymica Romanica 10.
Cano González, Ana María & Susana Villa Basalo (eds.). 1998. Actas del IX Coloquio PatRom, Uviéu/Oviedo, 26–29 octubre 1995. Patronymica Romanica 11.
Boullón Agrelo, Ana Isabel. 1999. Antroponimia medieval galega (ss. VIII–XII). Patronymica Romanica 12.
Nunes, Naidea Nunes & Dieter Kremer. 1999. Antroponímia primitiva da Madeira e Repertório onomástico histórico da Madeira (séculos XV e XVI). Patronymica Romanica 13.
Kremer, Dieter, Ivo Castro & Wulf Müller (eds.). 2003. Miscelânea Patromiana: Actas do V Colóquio (Lisboa), Comunicações do VII Colóquio (Neuchâtel) e do VIII Colóquio (Bucureşti). Patronymica Romanica 20.
Hafner, Ute. 2004. Namengebung und Namenverhalten im Spanien der 70er Jahre. Patronymica Romanica 21.
Piquer Ferrer, Esperança. 2005. Censos de población del territorio de Barcelona en la década de 1360. Patronymica Romanica 22.
Becker, Lidia. 2009. Hispano-romanisches Namenbuch: Untersuchung der Personennamen vorrömischer, griechischer und lateinisch-romanischer Etymologie auf der Iberischen Halbinsel im Mittelalter (6.–12. Jahrhundert). Patronymica Romanica 23.
Gordón Peral, María Dolores (ed.). 2010. Toponimia de España: Estado actual y perspectivas de la investigación. Patronymica Romanica 24.
Gordón Peral, María Dolores (ed.). 2013. Lengua, espacio y sociedad: Investigaciones sobre normalización toponímica en España. Patronymica Romanica 25.
Further reading on the project
Germain, Jean. 2017. “Les différentes sources au cœur du projet PatRom (PATRONYMICA ROMANICA).” Nouvelle Revue d’Onomastique 59: 105–124. DOI 10.3406/onoma.2017.1877.
Taverdet, Gérard. 2004. “Autour du Patrom.” Nouvelle Revue d’Onomastique 43–44: 61–66. DOI 10.3406/onoma.2004.1464.
No comments:
Post a Comment