Personal Naming in Baneh, a Socio-Onomastic Study

This paper deals with the impact of sociocultural changes on the corpus of personal names in Baneh from a socio-onomstic perspective. Corpus of personal names means the body of names selected by parents in the target society to name their children. The research method is descriptive-analytic and the universe includes the sum of selected names in the target society from 1921 to 2017. Therefore, using descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage), inferential statistics, and SPSS software, we first analyze the changes in naming practices in Baneh based on defined periods, and then we try to provide a comprehensive analysis of the whole era, i.e. the last hundred years. The description and analysis in this research is based on the classification of the names as "religious", "national", "ethnic", and "non-religious names derived from non-Iranian languages". The results of the research indicate that the percentage of religious names has been decreasing in the recent century; on the contrary, the percentage of national and ethnic names has shown a rising trend. However, the percentage of ethnic male names has dropped slowly in recent few years. Conceptual Arabic names have also had a dramatic decline, and in the past few years, especially since the early 1390s, non-Iranian (considering the language family, i.e. Turkish, Hebrew and European languages) names have been used. These changes indicate that in the target society, tendency towards detraditionalization and, as a result, individualism has increased, moreover, the change in people’s taste in names and naming reflects changes in socio-cultural structures.