Abstract
AbstractThis paper investigates the sociolinguistics of the family names in Palestine. It hypothesizes that family names reflect the style of life in the past in terms of agriculture, professions, industry, human characteristics and place of living. The data were collected from the telephone directory published by the company of telecommunications in Palestine West Bank in 2001.All names having telephone lines are listed in the alphabetical order of the family names; 8,343 family names were found. One third of the sample are religious names which have forms similar to first given names like” Ali,” “Hasan” and “abdul+any of God's names” like “abdul-Raheem” and “abdul-Rahmaan,” or “Muhammad, Mahmoud and Ahmad.” Such names do not reflect any aspect of social life. The other two-thirds of these names reflect lifestyle and human characteristics. Analysis was limited to this portion of names. The order of distribution from highest to lowest is: names denoting physical features, temperament, geography, agriculture, business, financial position, timing and planets.
Highlights
This paper investigates the sociolinguistics of the family names in Palestine
Giovanni (1982) classified the frequency of 830 personal names belonging to 830 telephone subscribers in the capital area of the Sultanate of Oman
Research on nicknames and family names is scant as evidenced by Tushyeh and Hamadallah (1992) who looked at 413 family nicknames in Palestine
Summary
This paper investigates the sociolinguistics of the family names in Palestine. It hypothesizes that family names reflect the style of life in the past in terms of agriculture, professions, industry, human characteristics and place of living. The closest study to the topic of this paper is that of Tushyeh and Hamadallah (1992) which investigated nicknames and family names in some Palestinian cities, villages and camps. Their sample was limited to 413 family names. In their analysis, they followed Antoun (1968) who classified family names in a village in the Jordan valley. The data were collected by going through the telephone directory, which was published by the Palestinian Communication Company in 2001 where names are listed according to the alphabetical order of family names. The largest category of names is of those that are based on physical features (see Table 2)
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