Onomastic ideological assemblages: A model for understanding personal name conflicts

I present a dynamic model for analyzing onomastic conflicts to explain why some personal names become involved in conflicts while others do not. The model takes a linguistic anthropological approach and is based on the concept of a “language ideological assemblage” (Kroskrity 2021). An assemblage includes the ideas and feelings people have about names, how names are created and used in cultural contexts, and how these are influenced by political structures, economic processes, and institutions. Examining onomastic ideological assemblages takes into account how conflicts are rooted in competing ideologies about names and how name conflicts at different scales interact with each other. The four scales of conflicts are: personal, interpersonal, institutional and societal. Examples are drawn from Canada and focus on how multicultural andmultilingual societies can be organized to produce inequalities.