Names in virtual landscapes

The second component study explores names in a virtual landscape accessed by teenagers through their mobile phones. This setting is of a highly private nature and the form of communication – including onomastic choices – is created by the teenagers themselves. In Sweden, almost all teenagers own a mobile phone and use this daily, primarily for interaction with peers (Swedish Media Council 2015: 7). Previous research on online naming practices has emphasized not only the high degree of playfulness (BEchaR-iSRaEli 1995), but also that online names often act as markers of identity (BuGhESiu 2012). However, existing studies have almost exclusively focused on chatfora usernames. The names to be studied in this article are of a partly different nature, since they are used for communication with close peers rather than with distant strangers and, therefore, probably constitute an environment that teenagers meet more often in their day-to-day lives.

For the purpose of this study, a small group of Swedish 14-year old youngsters (two girls and two boys) took screenshots of all of their written mobile phone interaction during two days in the year 2016. As they are minors, parents consented to the study. The teenagers live in a middle status suburb located a few miles south of the city center. The level of education is lower here than in many other parts of the municipality; 38% of the adult population have higher education.⁴ At the same time, the yearly level of income is at an intermediate level (approx. 26,500 EUR) and the employment rate is high (87%). Few inhabitants are born abroad (11%).⁵

During the time of the study, the participating teenagers used a number of different technologies for peer interaction: Embedded Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM), Facebook, KiK, Snapchat as well as the YouTube channel. Some of these technologies allow their users to both choose a self-referencing name and to adapt how the display names of others are indicated on their phone, i.e. the teenagers could use another form of reference for their peers than the actual names they had chosen for themselves. This resulted in a virtual onomastic landscape consisting of both self-referencing and other-referencing names.

The collected strings of interaction documented by the teenagers during the study were searched for indications of user names and display names. For ethical reasons, only names created by the participating teenagers themselves were collected and analyzed (i.e. not names created by peers who were not informed about the study). The teenagers also participated in individual

4 All referred statistics is available at: www.halmstad.se

5 This information was provided through e-mail correspondence with an official at Halmstad municipality statistics unit, <direkt@halmstad.se>, November 11, 2017.

76 Emilia Aldrin–Linnea Gustafsson reflective interviews, during which they were asked to, among other things, give further examples of and explain their onomastic choices.

In order to protect the identities of the teenagers, names that include offline personal names have been anonymized and other identifying elements are handled with care. The small data in this component study does not allow for any generalizations, but may point out some initial indications of socio-onomastic aspects of the virtual landscape accessed by a particular group of people.

3.1. Results and analysis

The data collection resulted in a total of 14 self-referencing usernames and 35 other-referencing display names that were used by the four teenagers during the two days of the study. Table 1 illustrates the distribution of onomastic elements within the names.

Self-referencing

names Other-referencing names First name element

(incl. abbreviations) 11 of 14 19 of 35

Last name element

(incl. abbreviations) 6 of 14 7 of 35

Byname element (incl.

hypocoristics) – 6 of 35

No offline personal

name element 1 of 14 10 of 35

Table 1: Onomastic elements in teenagers’ online virtual landscape

As is evident from table 1, the usernames apparent in the virtual landscape of these teenagers, often contained elements from offline personal names. First names were used more often than last names, which manifests the informality and relative closeness of peer-relations within the particular setting. At the same time, use of first names and last names leads to a higher degree of formality than would bynames or name innovations, which seldom occur in this particular setting. Furthermore, usernames containing offline names evoke the same indexical socio-onomastic meanings (A^LDRIN 2017, cf. o^chS 1992, E^ckERT 2008), with the consequence that certain offline social hierarchies are reproduced by teenagers in the virtual landscape. This will be discussed later in the article.

In addition to an offline name element, the user names and display names in this data often contain supplementary parts (cf. H^äMäLäINEN 2013). This part of the online name includes playing with spelling, numbers and emoticons in a way that mediates the formality of the name as a whole. In line with previous studies, it is evident that the written form of a username is important in the virtual landscape (a^lEkSiEjuk 2016). In this respect, online personal names deviate from offline personal names (for which the spoken form of the name is often more important) and approximate names in the toponymic landscape.

Bynames and hypocoristic forms are only used in other-referencing display names, indicating that this name category may, at least by these teenagers, be perceived to be an onomastic strategy for referencing to others, but not a strategy taken on for self-reference. An interesting example of this is provided by one of the teenagers in the interview. He describes that he once tried to create a byname for himself, as part of the search for a proper online username. Many of his friends have offline bynames in the peer group, but he does not. He perceives the prime reason for this being that his first name is not of Swedish origin and, therefore, difficult to adapt to the general Swedish patterns for hypocoristic nicknaming. However, offline nicknames differ from online self-referencing usernames in that the former are not created by individuals themselves and often indicate the existence of a particular relationship between name giver and name carrier (G^uSTaFSSon 2016: 48). When this teenager created an online self-referencing username seemingly containing an offline byname (which was not in use), he also went against a naming norm. As a result, the name was described as “really strange” both by the teenager himself and his peers and it was not used as an online self-referencing username for long.

The pattern among the other-referencing names is slightly different, since almost a third of the names avoid offline personal name elements. Instead, these names are constructed using descriptive words. Firstly, there are a number of names consisting of social categorizations, such as Best friend, Mum, My sister etc.

These names position the named peer in relation to the name giver and can be said to emphasize relational identities. They all seem to be positively including in relation to the specific named peer. Excluding names or names with negative connotations seem to be non-existing (at least from the point of view of an outsider; according to L^yTRA 2003 the final interpretation of a certain name use can only be made by the addressed peer or by studying his/her reaction to the name). Instead, it seems that exclusion is created through not giving all peers adapted other-referencing names, i.e. the absence of a personalized name can be excluding (cf. ADAMs 2009). However, in some cases a differentiating hierarchy among the names is manifested. This is achieved through lexical items (such as in the name Best friend) or through emoticons (such as the addition of one or several hearts), which point to an exclusive position of a particular

78 Emilia Aldrin–Linnea Gustafsson peer in relation to others (cf. A^DAMs 2009). Secondly, several other-referencing names consist of other nouns and adjectives that are not social categorizations, such as My everything, My hero. These names seem to have a primary affective function explaining why the named peer is viewed as important by the name-giver. Again, they are all seemingly including and carry positive connotations.

One of the boys explains his use of such onomastic strategies in this way:

If you like someone a lot or find them nice, you may write ‘the king’. You may write ‘the best’ if it is someone you ‘have days’ with, or are in love with, or friends with.

This example emphasizes the multi-indexical and metaphorical nature of descriptive name elements, similar to offline nicknaming practices (moRGan– o’n^Eill–h^aRRÉ 1979, ^DE k^lERk–B^oSch 1999, l^YTRa 2003).

The majority of all collected names within the studied part of the teenage virtual landscape seem to have been created using Swedish name elements, Swedish hypocoristic patterns and Swedish words. This creates a primarily monolinguistic Swedish onomastic landscape. However, other languages are represented to some degree as well. One teenager uses a number of other-referencing names in Arabic, which is not her mother tongue but a language she is studying as a foreign language in school. For example, she uses the name Shaqiqa (meaning ‘sister’) as display name for one of her closest peers. In the interview she explains the language choice: “We want something special that no one else understands”. She thus indicates that Arabic is not a commonly used language in her peer group and, therefore, can act as “something special”.

The use of Arabic words as onomastic resources, in this case, seems to function simultaneously as a way to create something unique and to create a secret code that strengthens the in-group connection between peers. At the same time, other peers that are not familiar with the Arabic language are excluded from the interaction and constructed as out-group members (cf. G^uSTaFSSon 2016:

102). This implies that the minority language is constructed as exotic. At the same time, it results in the language becoming more visible in the particular virtual landscape. Only one name in the data is created using English (the name My hero). This is interesting considering that the group of teenagers often used English words in their mobile phone interaction. This may indicate that the position of the English language is perceived differently as tool for interaction versus as tool for onomastic creation, at least in this particular group.

When the teenagers described their attitudes to their own and others’ usernames in the reflective interviews, they often used labels such as: “cool”, “creative”,

“unique”, “practical”, “easy”, “boring” and “immature”. These labels seem to be corresponding to potential social positions within the peer-group: cool-nerdy, creative-boring, unique-common, practical-unpractical, immature-mature.

Due to the limited data, no conclusions can be drawn regarding which kind of usernames are connected to which positions by which teenagers. None the less, teenagers’ narratives suggest that choosing a certain username for one self and others can be part of social positioning and creation of inclusion and exclusion within the online social space.

Within the virtual setting people have access to a large variety of resources and are able to influence the linguistic and onomastic landscape to a great extent. The virtual onomastic landscape, thus, largely consists of a bottom-up flow (B^En-R^aFaEl et al. 2006: 10). People can construct names that display themselves, not only as they are, but as they want to be. Nevertheless, the participating teenagers in this study often choose to construct names that signal closeness to their offline selves, sometimes complemented with a more personalized element. Using some of the communication technologies, the teenagers were also allowed to construct names for their peers. This gives them an opportunity to take control over the social space within the landscape and create relations and hierarchies in a way they wish – including or excluding – mostly without others ever seeing and contesting their descriptions of reality.

The virtual landscape that teenagers move through therefore becomes, not so much a landscape of localities, but a landscape of social relations. Names are chosen and interpreted as guiding cues within the social space.

4. Conclusion

With these two somewhat different studies, we have tried to give insights in an ongoing project on socio-onomastic landscapes in Halmstad. We wanted to explore the importance of names for the establishment of inclusion and exclusion in everyday life. The results so far show that, quite expectedly, there are differences between the two environmental layers: the public outdoor environment and the virtual environment. In the first of these there also exist adults, and the names are created by adults, while this is considerably less common in the virtual one. Another difference between the two kinds of environments is that place names have more importance in the geographical landscape and personal names in the virtual landscape. In both environmental layers, names contribute to mark boundaries and include or exclude certain groups of teenagers. However, the question of to what extent this influences teenagers’ perceived sense of belonging has not been analyzed here and is something we will return to in forthcoming studies within the project.

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