Dynamics of anthroponymy in the context of migration: Borşa, Maramureş county, Romania

Abstract

This paper is a sociolinguistic analysis of anthroponyms from Borşa, Maramureş county, Romania, in the context of migration. The research illustrates the dynamic of anthroponyms, the frequency of foreign names and bilingual nominal structures, as well as the sociocultural factors underlying the choice of names. The corpus of the article consists of first names of newborns, extracted from civil and parish registers of Borşa and verified, in part, through a questionnaire filled in by the parents. The time interval proposed for the analysis spans 18 years (2000– 2018), including the period in which migratory flows multiply and many migrants return. Thus, the onomastic material subjected to research is representative of anthroponymic multiculturalism in Romania.