| Abstract [eng] |
This paper investigates the variants of 20th century 90s decade most popular Latvian personal names and the situations of their usage. To research the tendencies questionnaire method was applied. The aim of this research is to reveal what variants of personal names are used to replace official personal names and what are the situations when these variants are used. The empirics of this paper are Latvian personal names‘ deformed and not deformed stem diminutives, deformed and not deformed stem suffixed and not suffixed clippings, reduplicated clippings, foreign languages personal names and other personal names by which the official personal name could be replaced. 5626 variants of chosen personal names were received from 100 questionnaires that were sorted out to the groups mentioned before. Analysis was based on personal names endings, nature of stem deformation, variation of suffixes and structure of clippings stems. The motives of using diminutives, clippings or replacing one name with another were analyzed separately. It was revealed that in Latvian spoken language the most dominant personal names‘ variant is diminutive – 78,1% of all personal names (clipped or nor clipped) were extended with diminutive suffixes. However, among clippings non-suffixed type is dominating. Furthermore, the tendency of using personal names in different gender form was noticed, especially with women names – 36,1% female names variants are used in masculine gender form. This tendency is clearly weaker among men‘s names – just 10 % of those variants were in feminine forms. Contrary to standard language variants of personal names that are used in spoken language tend to have deformed stem. Deformation could be quantitative or qualitative. Analysis of usage motives showed that the main factor to use variant of a personal name is close personal relationship. The most often used forms are diminutives – 96,9 % of respondents claimed using them, a little bit less respondents (92,3%) claimed that they are using clippings and 74,5% are replacing personal names with other native or foreign language personal names. |
