Who Are You? (Parent’s Naming Strategies for Their Bilingual Children)

Abstract

The article discusses the sociocultural aspects of the parents choosing a personal name for their child in foreign cultural environment. In order to find out the motivation for choosing a name by parents in 2017–2019, a pilot sociolinguistic experiment was conducted in monoor multilingual families inFinland. The research methods were chosen: the method of sociolinguistic questionnaire, focused interviews, the method of verification, the case study method. The total number of children’s names which were analyzed is 57. Main types of motivation in naming in mono-and polylingual families are historical/cultural, linguistic (phonological/phonetic, associative/semantic) and religious/mystical reasons.