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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesDepartment of Dutch Language and Literature

Familiennamengeographie: Atlas van familienamen in het Nederlandse taalgebied (AFNeT)

Ann Marynissen

This research project aims at documenting and interpretating the formal (i.e. grammatical and lexical) variation in the Dutch and Flemish family names.

In my preliminary research on the geography of types of familynames in the Dutch language area, I discussed several aspects of the geography of names, with a focus on morphosyntactic contrasts however.

In 2016 my name-geographical research of the Dutch language area was renewed, due to new name material (anno 2008) and new software. According to current international standards, the frequency of the names is presented by circle symbols, that represent the proportion between the variants. Moreover, thanks to the possibiltiy to visualize either the relative or the absolute frequency of the selected name patterns, the geographical borderlines between contrasting types of names do appear much clearer as before.

As an illustration, the map below shows an example of a morphosyntactic issue: the geographical contrast between the genitive (with ending -s) and the nominative form (without ending) of all Dutch and Flemish family names that are composed with the Germanic element -brecht (relative frequency).

The utmost rich family name material holds numerous linguistically interesting research questions. The project aims at the online publication of a great number of linguistically commented name maps with striking contrasts. (see: http://familienamen.eu/atlas/)

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