Ukrainian Onomastic Identity Across 15 Years (2006–2021)

Abstract

Proper names habitually express the cultural and social characteristics of a group; therefore, they express collective confirmation of a sense of self-image, affiliations, and emotional anchors. The goal of this investigation is to help deepen our understanding of the onomastic identity revealed in the collective discourse and manifested through the memetic features of onyms. The research presented here consolidated onomastics, psycholinguistics, memetics, and cultural studies. The focus of this investigation is on the changing collective onomastic identity in the Ukrainian society. The data for this research was gathered from two free associative experiments carried out with Ukrainian respondents in 2006 and 2021. In both years, respondents were presented with identical lists of stimuli. Both corpora reveal proper names with memetic features that were preserved in collective memory.