This book contributes to the growing field of critical onomastic enquiry, examining naming practices from different angles and focusing not only on the structural aspects of names, but also on their impact on the people concerned.

The first part deals with the role of anthroponyms and toponyms for the formation of identities. Katarzyna Aleksiejuk explores internet usernames and their function for the users who choose their own names, struggling between expressing and concealing their identity. Ian D. Clark examines folk-onomastic attitudes to Aboriginal place names via travel accounts from the nineteenth century. Michael Walsh also explores names in Aboriginal communities, analysing trends and taboos in introduced naming practice. Ellen S. Bramwell describes the interplay of English and Gaelic in official and unofficial personal names on the Western Isles of Scotland, where the complicated naming system includes individual and kinship bynames, nicknames, and maritonyms. The diglossic landscape of Norfolk Island is explored by Peter Mühlhäusler & Joshua Nash who uncover that the endangered idiom Norf'k has been recently flourishing in the domain of tourism.

The second part focuses on attitudes towards names. It starts with Laura Kostanski evaluating the outcomes of a name restoration programme in Australia. She analyses toponymic attachment, identity, and dependence and discusses a specific community's reaction to renaming efforts. Terhi Ainala raises methodological questions on how to study people's beliefs and perceptions regarding names. She presents a folk-onomastic study, discussing people's attitudes to street names in Helsinki. Maimu Berezkina studies onomastic material in multicultural Oslo relying on a linguistic landscape methodology. She analyses people's attitudes to toponyms with a focus on the various languages used in the public sphere. Maggie Scott compares the status of Scots in the onomasticon and the lexicon and reveals some interesting differences, uncovering for instance that Scots is deliberately used in private and commercial naming practices. The second part concludes with Erzsébet Győrffi providing an overview of Hungarian slang toponym use based on a survey among university students.

Part 3 examines naming as a political act. Guy Puzey analyses toponyms as key tools in the promotion of counter-hegemonies in two different contexts—Nynorsk movement in Norway and Lega Nord's language campaign in Italy. Staffan Nyström gives an insight into how names are chosen for official use by the Name Drafting Committee of Stockholm and the reasons that inform these choices. Justyna B. Walkowiak provides a broad picture of naming policies emerging from different legal frameworks and different aspects of personal name planning and policy. Aud-Kirsti Pedersen focusses on the official use of toponyms and describes two problems with the Place-Names Act: the spelling and official use of Norwegian farm names and of Sámi and Kven place names. In the last chapter, Kaisa Rautio Helander looks into the legal basis for the official recognition of Sámi place names in Finland and Norway and reveals differences between the two states.

This volume covers a variety of pressing themes in naming studies. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of onomastics and the critical approach advocated by the contributors, the book is also particularly valuable for scholars in pragmatics, human geography, and sociology.