The bilingual nickname stock of Béb

Abstract

The bilingual nickname stock of Béb

The paper deals with the questions regarding the nature and functions of nicknames in language use and presents the former and current nickname stock of Béb, a small village in the Transdanubian area of Hungary as indicators of the strong correlation between names, a community and its history. For two centuries the rich, heritable German nicknames represented the family relations and the cultural and dialectical features of the ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population of Béb. However, the direct consequences of World War II launched the unstoppable process of ethnic mixing and language change, which had an impact on the nickname stock as well: the former nickname stock began to fade with the oldest generations and was replaced with a new, bilingual nickname stock. The structural, semantic and lingual aspects of the nicknames used by a mostly monolingual younger generation can provide information about the cognitive processes which played a significant role in their creation.