Ethnic Personal Names

Language in Society 31, 577–608. Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.1017.S0047404502314040

Ethnic personal names and multiple identities in Anglophone Caribbean speech communities in Latin America MICHAEL ACETO Department of English East Carolina University Greenville, North Carolina 27858 [email protected] ABSTRACT

This study investigates the generation and maintenance of multiple personal names in an Anglophone Creole-speaking community of Panama. Nearly every Afro-Panamanian resident of the island of Bastimentos has two given names, one Spanish-derived and the other Creole-derived. The Creole or “ethnic name” is virtually the exclusive name used locally for reference and address. It is argued that these ethnic names are preferred for reference and address because they reflexively define who members of this speech community are in terms of culture and ancestry. A typology of nicknames and pseudonyms as well as a brief cross-cultural presentation of multiple or alternative personal names is provided. Ethnic name usage in Bastimentos is discussed within an acts of identity framework. (Creole, Panama, ethnicity, nicknames, pseudonyms, identity, onomastics)* What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 43– 44 INTRODUCTION

The familiar Shakespearean assertion about the rose reflects the views of many linguists who would argue that concepts exist in a framework for language and thought, independent of the language-specific words that are eventually applied to them (Chomsky 1988:31–32). However, speakers of any given language often have a number of names for referencing and addressing one another. If we shift our perspective from a cognitive or language-universals approach to a context in which meaning is socially constructed by the use of language(s) spoken within a specific culture, multiple names for individuals make a difference. That is, different names for the same referent may be valued differently within specific cultural contexts, and the question of whether absolute synonyms (regarding personal names or otherwise) exist in any language is openended (see Cruse 1986:268–70). The names humans choose for themselves and © 2002 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045002 $9.50

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for others offer windows into how a culture views these individuals, or how those individuals prefer to be perceived by society at large, according to the identities, roles, expectations, hierarchies, or values constructed within a social space. Goodenough clarifies this culturally driven context of names and naming practices: Different naming and address customs necessarily select different things about the self for communication and consequent emphasis. In some instances what is selected for emphasis will reflect and reinforce dominant public values; in others what is selected will reflect personal concerns . . . In any event, it will be something about which people are concerned, something about their own identities or the identities of others that they want to emphasize. What it will be depends on the nature of the identity problems their social circumstances prevailingly create for them. (1965:275; emphasis in original) In addition, Bean (1978:xiv) reminds us that “participants in a speech act may bring almost any combination of social identities to it.” This article aims to describe the pattern of personal names and ethnic name usage in the Anglophone speech community of Bastimentos, Panama, in Central America. As citizens of the Republic of Panama, Anglophone Creole speakers are forced to negotiate two linguistic and cultural worlds. Panama is a largely Spanishspeaking country in which political, economic, and social centers are controlled in varieties of Spanish (regional or otherwise). However, within the linguistic mosaic of Panama, often unknown even to citizens of the country itself, are more than a hundred thousand speakers of at least three varieties of English-derived Creole.1 This study focuses on how the residents of Bastimentos (or Ol’ Bank, as it is known locally; even this dual designation for their community is important in understanding the dichotomy of cultural0ethnic identities described below) resist, in varying degrees, the ambient cultural pressure to Hispanicize, and how they are able to maintain alternative cultural models, of which naming systems constitute one component. This resistance is accomplished through a number of strategies that have their roots in the history of the community. First, the residents of Bastimentos are descended from English-derived Creole speakers whose ancestors arrived approximately one century ago (or more, in some cases) from islands in the Anglophone West Indies. As Afro-Panamanians of Anglophone West Indian descent, the people of Bastimentos largely conduct their lives in a local Englishderived Creole, often called “Guari-Guari” or simply “English.” This preference for Guari-Guari in local contexts demarcates the population of Bastimentos from other regions in Panama, even within its own province of Bocas del Toro (see Map 1). Second, and more important for the purposes of this article, an alternative or ethnic naming system (in contrast to the “official” system of given names in Spanish) has emerged or has been maintained that favors locally derived Anglophone Creole names (e.g., Skip) over official Hispanophone names 578

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(e.g., Demetro) for usage in local contexts. Hispanophone first or personal names, however, are the only names to appear in writing and on any official documents (passports, birth certificates, diplomas, marriage licenses, etc.). This preference for referencing and addressing persons with Anglophone Creole names in local contexts (or, more precisely, whenever Creole is spoken) is discussed within a framework of illuminating patterns in resistance, cultural0linguistic maintenance and identity, diglossia and bilingualism, and cross-cultural practices of naming and nicknames. Fasold (1990:2) writes, “In most languages, there are two main kinds of address forms: names and second-person pronouns.” Though address forms in general have been studied from the perspective of the dichotomy of power and solidarity (e.g., Brown & Gilman 1972, Brown & Levinson 1987), the primary language of the Bastimentos speech community demands a related but alternative perspective. Its English-derived Creole has no contrasting familiar and deferential pronouns of power and solidarity; surnames are not used locally for reference and address; and formal titles are rare, except perhaps Teacher and the diminishing use of an older title system of address that combines Mister or Miss with an individual’s personal name (not surname), which today sees limited use only in addressing elderly people. This article is less about systems of address and their usage as typically discussed in the literature than about the generation and maintenance of multiple personal names. However, social factors are certainly at play in the use of alternative naming strategies in Bastimentos. My perspective is that, despite the irrelevance of contrastive pronouns and formal systems of address for this speech community, solidarity is created in this cultural space through the construction of ethnicity. Ethnic names comprise one component of ethnicity, as would language, ancestry, religious customs, food traditions, etc. That is, even without the obvious contrasts of pronominal and titular options, solidarity can still be implicated as at play in the generation, maintenance, and usage of ethnic names. Immigration in the past 150 years is largely responsible for bringing Creole English to both Panama and Costa Rica. In the post-emancipation period, West Indians of African descent immigrated to the Caribbean coast of Central America in search of work on railroad construction projects and banana plantations. It is often forgotten that the construction of the Panama Canal was carried out largely, not by Central Americans or workers from the USA, but by imported Anglophone West Indian labor. Many of these West Indians remained behind on either end of the Canal, in Panama City on the Pacific and Colon on the Caribbean, and they represent one significant source of Creole-speaking communities in this region of Panama. In the Caribbean corner of Bocas del Toro, near the Costa Rican border, where my fieldwork was conducted, the historical situation is somewhat different. After work on the Canal was completed, some immigrants moved to this area looking for work on fruit plantations. These Anglophone Creole-speaking immigrants Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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quickly outnumbered the descendents of older slave and Creole-speaking communities, which derived historically from Providencia and San Andrés islands.2 The population of Bastimentos proper – the town center – is approximately 600 persons, and approximately 97 percent are Afro-Panamanians of West Indian descent. A few Amerindian Guaymí families also live on the edges of the town. Scattered throughout the island are more Guaymí families living in the bush, thought to comprise another 300– 400 persons. Thus, the entire population of the island is about one thousand.

Map 1: The Province of Bocas del Toro In Bastimentos, Afro-Panamanians mostly speak Creole English as a first language among themselves, and many non-Afro-Panamanians (those of mostly Amerindian and0or European ancestry) often speak Guari-Guari as a second or a third language. Yet even the youngest residents of the island are able to hear Panamanian Spanish spoken between residents and outsiders, in the media, and, less frequently, among residents themselves. Residents are typically not taught to read and write in any form of English; however, a few have access to print media in Standard (usually American) English. Before the nationalist movement in Panama led by General Omar Torrijos in the late 1960s and 1970s, public-school instruction among Creolespeaking populations was allowed by the national government to occur in varieties of Caribbean English (teachers were often recruited from Anglophone islands of the Caribbean). This situation began to change about 30 years ago, and today no public school is permitted to deliver general curriculum instruction in English. The public educational system does not recognize Creole; Span580

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ish is the only medium of instruction.3 Bastimentos Creole is purely an oral language. In Bastimentos, there are no media representing Creole English forms, whether radio, television, newspapers, or other local publications. There is electricity in the town center, and many people have televisions receiving programs broadcast in Spanish. There were no satellite dishes in 1994 and 1995 when I carried out my fieldwork, so residents were unable to receive television broadcasts in any English language variety. Among my male consultants, monolingual Creole proficiency was more common than among Afro-Panamanian females, who are often bilingual in Creole and local varieties of Spanish. Some of the island’s older residents, both male and female, are monolingual speakers of Creole. There is limited familiarity with metropolitan English on the part of a few residents who have been educated outside the Bocas del Toro region. Most island residents educated outside (e.g., in Panama City, Colon, or the USA) have not returned to live there, even if they visit from time to time. This study is part of a larger series of articles on the Creole language of Bastimentos (Aceto 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), the results of approximately six months of fieldwork on the island on two separate occasions in 1994 and 1995. For details on specific methodological considerations and more historical information on the Bastimentos community, consult Aceto 1995. A LT E R N AT I V E N A M I N G S T R AT E G I E S

The study of naming practices and their relationship to social structure has been of some interest to researchers, particularly in anthropology. See Collier & Bricker 1970, Price & Price 1972 for striking case studies in the Americas; Burton 1999 is a compendious review article; and Bean 1978 is perhaps the most detailed individual study. Unfortunately, in the literature on naming and onomastics, any alternative name – a name used in addition to a formal or official name – may be ambiguously labeled a “nickname,” perhaps because many researchers come from cultures in which multiple personal names are infrequent, limited largely to nicknames in which a formal or official name is more or less phonetically reduced (e.g., Michael . Mike or Mick). Thus, the discussion in this section has at least two main purposes. First, it is an effort to encourage some rigor and distinction in regard to what appear to be related but different naming terms and strategies. To this end, I provide a typology of the terms nicknames, pseudonyms, and what I call ethnic names, and their application and relationship to naming practices and identity in Bastimentos, as well as among other cultural groups. Second, though I argue below that ethnic names are neither nicknames nor pseudonyms, this naming category reveals characteristics shared by both of the others. This observation has motivated the discussion of nicknames and pseudonyms presented here in order to understand what components of each constitute this new Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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category, ethnic names (see Dorian 1970 for discussion of “by-names”).4 A brief review of related work in naming systems is also presented and discussed within a cross-cultural perspective. I claim that alternative names or multiple naming practices signal the emphasis or construction of an imminent or latent identity (or, inversely, in some cases, the rejection or concealment of a previous identity) correlated with one or more socially constructed components, such as language, kinship, social status, ethnicity, nationality, spirituality, or gender. Nicknames A nickname is typically a name given to an individual in addition to his or her “given” or official first name.5 It is created and maintained by friends, family, and various social groups, but it most often originates from those groups organized and controlled by children, though a nickname’s use may extend well beyond the boundary of adolescence (see Alford 1988, Morgan et al. 1979). A nickname often highlights characteristics or stigmas, physical or social, to which the recipient is reluctant to call attention. Morgan et al. add, “Nicknames very often home in on just those characteristics he would prefer to forget” (1979:5). The feature that seems crucially to define nicknames is that they are most often assigned to individuals against their will and are usually maintained by “the children’s autonomous social world” (Morgan et al. 1979:3). Alford writes, “It appears that abusive or derogatory nicknames are more common than neutral or positive nicknames” (1988:82). Recipients rarely generate their own nicknames, even if the nickname subsequently “sticks” and the recipient begins self-referring by the new name. Furthermore, nicknames seem to be used more often for reference than for address (Alford 1988:82). They often focus on external factors (external to the phonetic shape of the original or official first or last name), such as perceived physical or behavioral abnormalities, rather than on internal factors (phonetic features of a name that may inspire the creation of a nickname; see below).6 Furthermore, externally derived nicknames seem to be the ones most objected to by their recipients. “Children are aware of the social power of names and are very sensitive to the names they receive from their peers” (Kohl & Hinton 1972:127). Kohl & Hinton call this category of names “peernames,” a label that appropriately emphasizes the role of the name-giver (rather than the recipient) in the naming process. Nicknames may be understood via internal or external strategies. An internally derived nickname may be based on a phonetic similarity with or a reduction of a recipient’s given or even last name (e.g., Laurie , Laurel or Lippy , Lipman). Many of these reduced nicknames may be additionally or directly affixed with a diminutive (e.g., an 0-i0 among English speakers, as in Joey , Joe , Joseph, or a diminutive 0-it-0 infix among Spanish speakers, as in Maurita , Maura; sometimes pet names or diminutives are referred to as hypocorisms). However, not all internally derived nicknames are the result of a reduction of a specific name. They may result from coincidental phonetic similarity or rhyme between the 582

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recipient’s original name (first or last) and the nickname, e.g. Michael . Motorcycle. In short, an internally derived nickname uses one of the recipient’s original names as the point of construction or inspiration: A linguistic quality, usually phonetic but in some cases semantic, associated with the recipient’s original name(s) is the point of departure for the creation of the nickname. Externally derived formations may result from qualities (physical, emotional, intellectual, or cultural) perceived as attributable to the recipient (e.g., Fats Domino was named for his size).7 Without a doubt, Aristocles is better known by the name Plato, a reference to his broad shoulders; Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi is certainly better recognized as Botticelli, a reference to his shape and its similarity to a “little barrel.” Another external path by which nicknames may be formed derives from a famous, striking, notorious, or shameful incident. For example, jazz alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley received his nickname not because of his large size, as might be assumed, but because of his impressive appetite: Cannonball is an alteration of his original nickname, Cannibal. Nicknames may also be derived externally as the result of cultural stereotypes; thus, sources may include place of origin, profession, or physical appearance. (For an impressively complete list of nicknames and0or epithets associated with specific ethnic groups, consult Allen 1983.) Pulgram (1954:11–18) notes that many of these same sources for externally derived nicknames are the origin of many IndoEuropean, Semitic, Chinese, West African, and Native American surnames. That is, what began as an “ekename,” or nickname, has diachronically evolved into a surname. Goodenough discusses the variety of personal names found among two societies in Oceania. He draws two basic conclusions: Names often function “as constant reminders to people of things about their identities [they] want to be reminded of” or “they are things about which most people want to remind their fellows” (1965:275). Bean states, “All speech is potentially an indexical sign of the speaker, the addressee, the time or place of speaking” (1978:4).8 Nicknames may be characterized as those things (events, characteristics, social hierarchies, etc.) that members of a community want to emphasize to their fellows, even if the recipients of the nicknames prefer to be reminded of or to index other aspects of their lives. Pseudonyms, in contrast, emphasize aspects of identity that the recipient of the name wishes to make known publicly, perhaps at the expense of more private aspects of his or her identity. Pseudonyms, assumed names, aliases and name changes The two Greek morphemes that make up the word pseudonym mean literally ‘false name’. However, Room (1981:5) makes the case that a pseudonym may be more accurately defined as an “assumed name,” since these names are most often taken on consciously and explicitly as a kind of name change (legal or otherwise), with little or no effort to deny the individual’s original name, even if the original name is rarely referred to. That definition is assumed here. The crucial distinction Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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between nicknames and pseudonyms is that recipients usually select their own pseudonyms; nicknames are usually chosen for them. Furthermore, pseudonyms are changes that apply more often to a surname than to a given name, though some pseudonyms involve changes to both. Nicknames primarily target given names, though surnames may also serve as their inspiration. Pseudonyms are common among individuals who assume a new, more public identity (e.g., in politics, in social and religious contexts, and especially in entertainment). For example, “Sojourner Truth” was an assumed name, selected by the recipient herself to represent her new role as a seeker of black and women’s equality in the 19th-century USA. Members of many Roman Catholic orders choose new names to represent their new spiritual lives: Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Black Muslims often drop their surnames, which they sometimes identify as “slave names” (typically Anglophone-derived names stemming from the history of European colonialism in the Atlantic region), when admitted into the Nation of Islam (Malcolm X [Shabazz] was previously named Malcolm Little; Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay).9 Pseudonyms are also frequent among actors; before the 1960s, actors with “ethnic-sounding” names often adopted more “Anglo-Saxon” pseudonyms – Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis were originally named Issur Danielovitch and Bernard Schwartz. Pseudonyms or assumed names can be distinguished from genuinely “false names,” or aliases, by which an individual attempts to maintain a new identity through the creation of a new name, while seeking to deny any historical connection to the previous name and its corresponding identity. Aliases are often assumed by criminal suspects who hope to disassociate themselves from criminal acts linked with their previous names. What aliases share with a subset of pseudonyms or name changes discussed below is the goal of concealment of a prior identity. As with most alternative naming strategies – whether pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, or ethnic names – they often indicate the emergence or creation of a new social identity. Within the context of the immigrant experience in the USA, some ethnic groups have traditionally sought to change their names by Anglicizing what might be perceived as an “ethnic” surname (any surname that impressionistically seems not an Anglophone name). Christopher (1989:31) claims that the Anglicization of immigrant names within the territory that would become the USA can be traced back at least to the 18th century, when some German immigrants Anglicized surnames (e.g., Mueller and Schmidt into Miller and Smith). By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Ashkenazic Jews immigrating to the USA also translated original Germanic names into their Anglophone counterparts (Schwartz and Klein into Black and Little). Both surname translation and outright name change in the USA are often associated with modern American cultural myths such as “the melting pot” phenomenon, or considered explicit attempts at assimilation to a general AngloAmerican culture. However, this reductionism fails to distinguish between phe584

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nomena based on the goals of assimilation and those based on other, less transparent motives. The “melting pot” perspective assumes that all ethnic groups immigrating to a specific host country share similar pre-immigration experiences, motives for immigration, and motivation for name changes precipitated by immigration. It is revealing to consider the name changes that followed the major wave of Jewish immigration to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Ashkenazic Jews residing in Europe were often legally compelled to abandon their original Hebrew-based names and to assume names derived from the local language of power. The national or regional governments in question (France, Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony in the 19th century) often cited goals of assimilation, taxation, conscription, and even “civilization” as explicit reasons for forcing name changes on Jews (see Kaganoff 1977 for compulsory name adoption by European Jews, as well as an excellent discussion of name alteration and changes among Jews in general). Once the fluid history of Jewish naming practices is revealed, one further name change in the Americas hardly seems an act of assimilation for a people forced over centuries to become flexible and adaptive. In fact, name changes may have been preferred by Jews not so much to assimilate (though this goal was certainly a factor for some, as for a subset of all immigrants) but to hide their ethnicity from non-Jews. Advertising their Jewish heritage in the past had brought few positive rewards to Jews vis-à-vis the dominant culture wherever they had resided. This distinction is important because what appears superficially as an act of assimilation may be more appropriately viewed, instead, as a means of cultural maintenance achieved via the strategies of secrecy and concealment (see Scott 1985). The case of alternative names among Jews is also useful to contrast with the pattern displayed by residents of Bastimentos. Whereas some Jews wished to “de-ethnicize” their names in order to conceal their ethnic identity, the AfroPanamanian population in this study most often publicly proclaims and emphasizes its Anglophone Creole ethnicity vis-à-vis the dominant Hispanophone national identity in Panama through the maintenance of ethnic personal names. Secret names or concealment of names is one motivation for and a correlate of alternative naming systems in several of the ethnic groups considered below (e.g., the Ndyuka and the Saramaka of Suriname). The abolishing of names as important cultural symbols by local governments has been carried out in other cultural and geographical contexts as well. For example, Johnson states that the colonial British in Sierra Leone “abolished native names wholesale, considering them ‘heathenish,’and substituted European names instead” (1921:87). However, as early as the late 19th century, West Africans in Sierra Leone – perhaps as a response to earlier forced name changes by the British – began to alter Anglophone-derived names in an effort to confirm an African identity vis-à-vis the pervasive European colonial influence. “A number of Creoles . . . ‘reformed’ their names as well, either shedding their ‘foreign’ surname to Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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adopt one with an African ‘sound,’ or adding an African name to their European one” (Spitzer 1974:117). Tamura (1994:170) describes how Japanese students were assigned English names as replacements for their original names at schools in Hawaii in the early 20th century. Nonetheless, many Japanese in Hawaii maintained Japanese names at home and Anglophone names in general public life, illustrating a dichotomy found among the residents of Bastimentos as well. Surname changes may also be invoked in response to age or at the threshold of a ritual event. Assumed names have been traditionally associated with females participating in the ritual of marriage. In many cultures, female surname replacement is the norm: The woman discards her family name and assumes that of her husband. In many societies today, there are several alternatives associated with marriage name change: The husband’s name may be attached to the wife’s family’s name by hyphenation; the wife may reverse the order and put the husband’s name first and her original name second; or she may make no name change at all. It is becoming more common for both husband and wife to bear a compounded form of both surnames, with prior agreement on the order of the names in question. In Spanish-speaking countries, it is typical that all single males and females have two official surnames: The first is the father’s surname, derived from his father, and the second is the mother’s surname, derived from her father. For a male, this compounded surname appears on all official documents, even if he is more commonly known by simply his father’s surname. Upon marriage, females typically discard their mother’s surname and replace it with the husband’s father’s surname. One further type of name change is teknonymy, the practice of designating various kinship roles and hierarchies, through names. Alford describes teknonymy as “easily the most common type of formal name change” (1988:90). Geertz & Geertz characterize teknonymy as the “progressive suppression of personal names and its regular substitution of what are essentially impersonal status terms” (1964:94). Alford believes teknonymy to be “a means of showing respect while avoiding the use of personal names” (1988:93). For a summary, consult Alford (1988:90–94); see also Suzuki 1978 for a discussion of teknonyms among the Japanese. This kinship-based system of name change does not figure among the Anglophone Afro-Caribbean populations that are the focus of this article. Ethnic names This new category of naming has been created to denote that the names preferred for reference and address in Bastimentos are neither nicknames nor pseudonyms. However, the category may be applied appropriately to many cultural spaces. Furthermore, the designation “ethnic names” may overlap with other terminology that has been created for culture-specific naming systems (e.g., “by-names” in Dorian 1970). Ethnic names reveal characteristics of both nicknames and pseudonyms, as well as their own unique social correlates related to issues of ethnic identity, cultural maintenance, solidarity, and resistance. The term “ethnic 586

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names” may also be considered equivalent to a term more specific to the culture in question. For example, “Creole names” would largely cover one component of the duality of names in Bastimentos. However, I use the term “ethnic names” to emphasize the fact that competing national and ethnic identities often require discrete names that are invoked through the use of ethnic or alternative languages (“alternative” vis-à-vis more socially or politically powerful and dominant cultures and languages in a pattern related to “broad diglossia”; see Fasold 1984:53). Ethnic names are “in part about the sociocultural world and in part in their connection to the social situation in which they occur” (Bean 1978:xiii; emphasis in original). Pulgram (1954:11–12) describes how a “signum” or “byname” became fashionable among peoples living under the eastern edges of the Roman Empire (Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor). Many of these peoples were bilingual in Latin and their native vernacular. They adopted Latin (or Greek) names for convenience in dealing with Romans. However, additional names were often added from local vernaculars, and these often replaced their “official” names used for administrative interactions with the Empire. Pulgram’s description is startlingly similar to the bilingual situation in Bastimentos and in other present-day cultural spaces. In many of the studies discussed below, an “official” name corresponds to the so-called “real” name (most likely because of its association with literacy), even if it is rarely used or even remembered by recipients, while the name of widest currency within the speech community is called the “nickname,” even if that term fails to capture the extensive distribution and usage of what I have labeled ethnic names, or whatever may correlate with other social identities besides ethnicity in specific speech communities. Pulgram makes the case that, etymologically, a “nickname” or an “ekename” was a “byname” (called here an ethnic name), despite the modern perception of nicknames as shortened forms of given names, or names given to individuals against their will (see n. 6). Within Panama, where Spanish is the language of power and social control, the residents of Bastimentos have resisted pressure to Hispanicize their surnames, which are overwhelmingly Anglophone (e.g., Powell, Livingston, Mitchell ). Official Spanish-derived first names are found on all government documents, and they identify individuals as citizens of the Republic of Panama. However, the residents of Bastimentos have purposely sought to “de-Hispanicize” their official Spanish-derived given names by the strategy of ethnic names; thus, a woman officially named Liliana is known locally as Yaya instead (see Table 1). The ethnic name is most often Creole-derived etymologically and phonologically, though a few may actually be from an African language or even from Spanish. Ethnic names are typically given when the person is a child or adolescent. More important, it is this name that an individual recognizes when it is uttered in conversation, and by which she is identified as an adult on the island, even though the name is rarely, if ever, written down. The ethnic name identifies a resident of Bastimentos as an Afro-Panamanian Anglophone Creole speaker whose ancesLanguage in Society 31:4 (2002)

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Sample of ethnic names in Bastimentos.

Ethnic name 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Anna Mae Betbet Betty Boss Charley Chichi Chola Chubb Cooley Coon Cootie Dodosh Dune Gadí Gang Hochi Jetbo Luch Pápa Peck Puma Silk Skip Soap Tatash Tiger Yaya Yogo

Official Spanish given name Nidia Roberto Roberto Rafael Herminia Veronica Viviana Alberto (Indian, Boy) Elizabeth Alvaro Enrique Fulvia Oscar Lucrezia Enrique Harvey Arquimedes Florentina Enrique Oscar Michon Michon Demetro Dario Harvey Tito Liliana Graciella

tors came from the West Indies. Nearly everyone in the town center is familiar to everyone else by his or her ethnic name – but there is often little knowledge, except among immediate family members, of an individual’s official Spanishderived first name. What ethnic names in the Bastimentos speech community have in common with the patterns of nicknames described above is that they are often, but not exclusively, generated by children or adolescents. In theory, however, anyone may assign an ethnic0Creole name at any time, and instances arise of individuals with more than one ethnic name. However, ethnic names in the Bastimentos community differ substantially from the typical pattern of nicknames associated with chil588

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dren in that the former are rarely, if ever, a source of shame, as nicknames (especially externally derived ones) often are. Furthermore, ethnic names are the names that recipients actually prefer to be recognized by in both forms of reference and address within the community, especially when referenced through the use of the local Creole language.10 That is, the typical pattern of nicknames foisted on individuals against their will does not capture the dynamics of ethnic namegiving in Bastimentos. Residents participate in the maintenance of their ethnic names and even sanction the use of those names in a manner reminiscent of pseudonym assumption. Furthermore, unlike nicknames, ethnic names in Bastimentos are almost never internally derived. They are also rarely Spanish-derived (except in a few female alternative names). The motive for avoiding internally derived ethnic names is that a reduced form of a Spanish-derived name (e.g., Kike , Henrique) is still identified easily as a Hispanophone name, and residents of Bastimentos prefer Creole-derived names as markers of ethnicity and solidarity. Both pseudonyms and nicknames often index an emergent or latent social identity. Ethnic names in Bastimentos are similar in that they index both ethnic and linguistic identities (Anglophone, West Indian, and0or Creole) that, though highly valued and salient locally among the Ol’ Bank population, are generally not valued or even recognized by outgroup members of Panamanian society at large. At this point, we may generalize that ethnic names are generated by external naming processes for purposes of identity creation, often associated with cultural maintenance. However, ethnic names are not created to obscure or conceal a specific ethnic origin, as is often the case with pseudonyms, but rather to distinguish or emphasize specific ancestry. Though the ethnic name is preferred in local Creole contexts by most speakers, individuals most often revert to their official Spanish-derived names when outside this locally constructed Creole language context. This characterization was often verified empirically in contexts in which I spoke Spanish with consultants. I also observed this pattern while witnessing conversations in Spanish throughout my six months on the island, during an election campaign for a national representative from Bocas del Toro province arriving from off-island, and when I attended a formal elementary-junior high school gathering in which only Spanish was spoken. The relationship between language choice and bilingualism and the preference for specific names that reference the languages in question are discussed in more detail below. The dynamic of pseudonyms and assumed names described above in cases of (ethnic) identity concealment is also relevant to the development and usage of ethnic names in the Bastimentos speech community. In general, name changes may function as the foundation for implicit cultural maintenance or concealment. However, if ethnic identity may be concealed within social contexts, the reverse may also be true. Ethnic identity may also be asserted, emphasized, or proclaimed in other social contexts. In Bastimentos, the creation and maintenance of ethnic names reflects the development of dual social identities that Afro-Panamanians of West Indian descent must often construct and negotiate Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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in Panama as they move between Anglophone and Hispanophone worlds. Locally, Anglophone-derived names and West Indian-derived culture dominate on Bastimentos island. Beyond the island, Spanish-derived Panamanian culture dominates, with geographical pockets of Creole-speaking communities in Panama City and Colon, and within the province of Bocas del Toro. Clearly, ethnic names are just one component in the creation of these competing identities for Bastimentos residents, but these names are salient markers of the dominance of one language0culture over another in specific contexts. The contexts that induce ethnic name usage match nearly precisely those in which Creole language is spoken. That is, language choice invokes the usage of ethnic names in Bastimentos. Multilingualism often indexes different social identities, so it should not be surprising that speakers often prefer different names as symbols of these identities, which are often invoked by language choice. Other minority groups in other cultural spaces exhibit similar patterns in the maintenance of ethnically identifiable given names or surnames, in contrast to the dominant ambient ethnicity and0or language at large. For example, people of Italian, Latin American, and Asian descent in the USA often maintain ethnically identifiable surnames, even if their given names reflect Anglophone influence, and even if the ancestral language has been replaced by American English. The ethnic name is the designation an individual willingly recognizes within the community as a form of address. In Bastimentos, individuals prefer their ethnic names to the official names on their birth certificates. There are only few contexts in which they use and recognize their official Spanish-derived names, mostly contexts that require literacy in Spanish or explicit reference to names on documents – interactions with police and educational institutions, voting, health care, or (less often) introducing themselves to tourists (mainly North Americans and Germans) who speak Spanish, unaware that the main native language of the community is an English-derived Creole. I encountered this contrast between official and ethnic name usage because of a methodological strategy I was employing to gather grammatical material on what was then an undocumented Creole language. When conducting interviews, I decided to speak to informants in Spanish as much as possible to avoid leading them toward a particular English-derived construction present in my own variety of English. Since most of my interviews were in Spanish, I usually elicited the official names of my consultants. As my proficiency in the local vernacular grew, I relied less on Spanish and more on Guari-Guari to gather data and conduct personal relationships. Often, when I referenced an individual’s Spanish-derived name in various contexts and conversations, locals looked confused. Conversely, often I didn’t understand the individual referenced by a specific name in conversation because I knew only the Spanish-derived names and not the Creole0ethnic ones. I began to realize that most individuals had two names, and then I focused on referencing the Creole-derived name because it was the one better recognized by an individual and the community at large. 590

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Table 1 is a representative sample that illustrates this pattern of ethnic names (the spelling of these names represents orthographic conventions in both Spanish and English rather than narrow linguistic transcriptions based on the International Phonetic Alphabet). The ultimate etymological origins of these names lie in three general sources: English0Creole, Spanish, and, perhaps, a handful of African languages. However, no African languages are currently spoken or used in fragmentary or fossilized form among the population of Bastimentos,11 not even in the ritual contexts described by Lipski 1989 for other regions of Panama.12 Both Englishand possibly African-language-derived sources for ethnic names may be collapsed into the category of the English-derived Creole language itself, since any residual African linguistic effects (lexical or otherwise) can only be derived synchronically from the Creole language, though it is possible that regional varieties of Panamanian Spanish may also exhibit influence from West African languages long ago spoken natively or still heard in vestigial form in the area. Spanish-derived names or words reflect the obvious fact that Spanish is productive in the area. My goal in this study is not to determine the African origins of specific ethnic names, but to understand their usage and distribution, so this line of inquiry will not be pursued further. (To determine possible African correspondences in Afro-American language varieties, consult Turner 1973 and Puckett 1975.) Several patterns are readily observable from the sample data in Table 1. One, the individuating functions of ethnic names (see Dorian 1970) is strongly suggested by the three pairs of co-occurring Spanish-derived names (Roberto, Oscar, and Michon) and the corresponding individuating ethnic names. That is, no ethnic name occurs twice in the sample data; and, more important, to my knowledge no ethnic name occurs twice among the Afro-Panamanian population of Bastimentos. In contrast, Spanish-derived official given names are repeated in many instances among the general population, male or female. Several of the ethnic names appear Spanish-derived: Chola, Pápa, Chi-Chi. Chola is a common female nickname among general Latin American Spanishspeaking populations. However, neither Chola nor Pápa are repeated as ethnic names among the Bastimentos Creole-speaking population, which again suggests the individuating function of alternative names, as well as their contrastive cultural function. However, Pápa reflects an Anglophone phonological stress pattern (cf. Papá in Spanish). Betbet may also be a hypocorism related to the reduction of the official name Roberto (. Berto . Beto . Bet), with reduplication at play. Betty may also be a reduced form of Roberto, with the Anglophone pattern of suffixing 0-i0 as a diminutive. Table 1 also reveals a binary pattern (or bias), in that males in Bastimentos often receive ethnic names associated with power while females do not. That is, animal names (Puma, Tiger) and what are often titles of respect in broader social contexts (Pápa, Boss) indicate this preference. The data from Belize, discussed Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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below, show a similar predilection for animal names, such as Snake, Lion, and Cat, as alternative names for males. A LT E R N AT I V E N A M E S I N T H E A N G L O P H O N E W E S T I N D I E S

Systems of alternative names (ethnic or otherwise) are not restricted to any particular culture or region of the world, even if the “naming systems of cultures differ in showing preference for names that are symbolically appropriate” (Bean 1978:86). In this section, I summarize and correlate a number of case studies in the West Indies that offer insights and0or parallels to the pattern of ethnic names in Bastimentos, without suggesting any necessarily causal or direct historical relationship between that speech community and any other region of the Caribbean or West Africa. Much of the work on alternative naming systems in the West Indies suggests, either explicitly or implicitly, that these naming systems are invoked more often for males than for females in a given society. For example, Manning, writing of Bermuda and Barbados, states: “Women are also known by nicknames, but to a lesser extent than men” (1974:124). This characterization also applies to the data I gathered in Bastimentos. Women may have ethnic names, but men almost always do. This pattern is also confirmed for Creole speakers in Belize (Ken Decker, personal communication, October 2000). Some of the reasons for this dichotomous patterning are related to different patterns of bilingualism (and assimilation) among males and females vis-à-vis the ambient language of power, and the separate social identities that different languages may index; see Trudgill 1983 for a discussion of covert and overt prestige and how these patterns relate to male0female language use. In Bastimentos, the association between monolingualism among males and trends toward bilingualism among females may account for why some females do not display ethnic names, or have only phonetically reduced forms of Spanish-derived given names (e.g., Dorinda . Dorie). That is, bilingualism, at least in Bastimentos, appears to encourage a kind of general assimilation in which local naming practices are commensurately diminished. However, day-names in Jamaica and Suriname (see below), a now defunct but once productive naming system, seem to have been applied equally to males and females. An examination of Manning 1974 and Crowley 1956 raises the question whether the alternative naming systems they describe are most accurately captured by the term “nickname.” It may be more illuminating to consider many of these instances as ethnic names instead. In government administrative contexts, in which more standard and politically powerful language forms are often spoken, one may predict that an individual will reference his or her official name; however, in instances in which local vernacular language varieties are spoken (Creole or otherwise), one would not be surprised to find an individual’s ethnic name as the most 592

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salient and productive form. As the cases described by Manning strongly suggest, the name in which a person’s death notice is announced might actually be his “real” name (what Manning calls the “nickname”), and his “official” name (which friends and family are mostly unfamiliar with) simply that. Jamaica DeCamp 1967 details the obsolete Jamaican tradition of day-names derived from the Twi-speaking region of modern Ghana (the Gold Coast, during the colonial period). The day-name assigned to a child reflects its sex and the day of the week on which it was born. These distinctions are indicated by a specific name for each day of the week and by a male0female suffix (e.g., Juba for a female born on Monday; the -a suffix indicates ‘female’; Cudjoe is the male counterpart). This day-name system seems clearly to have been a West African cultural retention, though Twi speakers were not the only West African cultural group represented among Jamaica’s slave population. The use of day-names diminished throughout the colonial period, passing through a stage in which they acquired pejorative meanings (see Dillard 1972:123–35 for a discussion of the same day-names among Africans and people of African descent in the USA). By the 20th century, this system of naming had passed into obsolescence. DeCamp implies that the dayname system may have functioned in conjunction with other naming systems. Though it has been asserted that Jamaicans dislike nicknames in general (Beckwith 1929:59) and that this dislike may have contributed to the obsolescence of the day-name system, DeCamp disagrees. He writes unequivocally: “At all social levels, from illiterate cane-cutter to university professor, Jamaicans enjoy giving fanciful names to their friends and to themselves” (143). He provides no other reference to nicknames or the creation of alternative naming systems.13 Burton 1999: provides evidence that slaves in Jamaica participated in multiple social and cultural identities, which were in turn referenced by alternative names: Slaves commonly used two, three or even more names according to context and circumstance: an African name when talking to Africans . . . an ‘official’ European-style name when addressing – or, rather, being addressed by – Massa or Busha, and a further name or nickname, European in form but indigenous [sic] in substance, when speaking to other Creole slaves.14 (1999:38–39) For slaves born in Africa and transported to the Americas, their “African name” may have been more salient as the “ethnic name” described in this article; for those born in the Americas, the so-called nickname may more precisely be considered the ethnic name used for referencing the emerging identity and ethnicity of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, or Creole as something related to but distinct from a specific ethnicity and culture in Africa.15 The “European-style name” seems to correspond generally with “white name,” bakáa ne˘, or pseudonym, as used by the Saramaka (see Price & Price 1972 and below). Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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Suriname A system of naming according to the day of the week is also found among the Ndjuka (Kahn 1931:128–129), a Maroon group of Suriname in northern South America. Modern-day Maroons are the descendents of slaves who rebelled or ran away from plantations on the coast to form independent societies in the interior rainforest. The Ndjuka descend from a group that formed during the early part of the 18th century. The Saramaka, another Maroon group in Suriname, formed somewhat earlier. Both groups created their own discrete, mutually unintelligible languages via creolization processes (see Price 1976). According to Kahn, the day-name (to use DeCamp’s term) system also derives from the Twi-speaking peoples of West Africa.16 He states that the Ndjukas have at least two names, “one which everyone may use and another which depends upon the day of the week on which the individual was born” (1931:170).17 Price & Price 1972 discuss names among the Saramaka Maroon group of Suriname, distinguishing three general types of personal names: (i) Gaán ne˘ ‘big name’ or ‘true name’, which becomes restricted in use in late adolescence and early adulthood; (ii) pikí ne˘ ‘little name’ or ‘nickname’, which is usually externally derived; and (iii) bakáa ne˘ ‘Western name’, literally ‘white name’, a name chosen by men who work on the coast of Suriname in a more European-influenced context where Dutch or Sranan (a third English-derived creole of Suriname) are often spoken. In the Saramaka case, name types (ii) and (iii) correspond well to my general definitions of, respectively, nicknames and pseudonyms. It appears that in Saramaka society, any male may select his bakáa ne˘, and that anyone, male or female, may generate and receive several pikí ne˘. Bakáa ne˘ seem to correlate closely with the immigrant name changes discussed above; that is, they are alternative names that may conceal the ethnic identity of the person referenced. One might also assume, as is often the case with alternative names, that when referencing these bakáa ne˘, Saramaka will speak either Sranan, the lingua franca of Suriname, or possibly Dutch, the colonial language of power also spoken in the capital, Paramaribo. In any case, one would be surprised if bakáa ne˘ were used when speaking Saramaccan, the ethnic language of the Saramaka. Among societies that display multiple or alternative names, language choice often invokes the use of an alternative name, ethnic or otherwise. Price & Price (1972:345–348) also discuss the origin of names in Saramaka society and reveal that these names are broken down according to what I have designated as externally and internally derived routes for nicknames. This is not to say that all names in Saramaka society may necessarily be considered nicknames, though a subset are explicitly so labeled by the authors. They provide several insights with parallels to the Bastimentos case: “Almost anyone is free to give a name at almost any time” (349); “Many names given to newborn children have no explicit meaning” (347; see the discussion of euphony in n. 7): and “By the time a person reaches his thirties, one or two names have usually become 594

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dominant over the others as terms of both reference and address, and these usually continue to be used as principal everyday names for the rest of his life” (351). St. Lucia Crowley 1956 describes some general naming patterns in St. Lucia; what he calls “nicknames” form just a small part of the discussion. St. Lucia was part of the Francophone West Indies before its colonial transfer to the British in the 19th century. Owing to this mixed colonial history, St. Lucia reveals two restructured language varieties: an earlier, French-derived Creole that seems to be losing numbers of speakers to the more recently emerging Anglophone Creole. Crowley writes that a child (females are not mentioned as recipients of these names; all examples are of the kind Ti Son ‘little boy’, Gwo Son ‘big boy’) may receive, in general, two types of names: a no sud or nickname, and a no savan or “bush name” (1953:90). Later, he describes a no sud as a “pseudonym,” then states that both a no sud and a no savan can be nicknames or aliases (90). Thus, there appears to be a rich system of assigning alternative names in St. Lucia, but it would be difficult on the basis of Crowley 1956 alone to assign it to the taxonomy of names discussed above. Despite his lack of rigor in distinguishing between nicknames and pseudonyms, Crowley offers some valuable motivations for naming in St. Lucia. He suggests (90) that the goal of secrecy, with two different motivations, is largely responsible for maintaining a variety of names for individuals (cf. the role of secrecy in name changes by Jewish immigrants; see Aceto 1995, Bellman 1984). One motivation is concealment of identity from government representatives, and the other is secrecy for the religious purpose of hiding one’s identity from someone who intends harm through obeah (sorcerous) activities. Crowley claims that naming customs in St. Lucia “provide an effective means of passive resistance to unpopular, or unsympathetic administrative influences, political, religious, and legal” (92). A similar naming dichotomy related to a bureaucratic or national0 local juxtaposition is revealed by Burton (1999:49): Martinican males in the Francophone West Indies tend to have an official ‘town-hall name’ (nom de mairie) and an unofficial ‘hill name’ (nom des mornes). Carriacou Smith writes: “All Carriacou folk will have at least two names, the Christian or church name, which is rarely used, and the ‘house name’ by which they are known in the community” (1962:91). He further states that anyone in the community may be the source of the house name, and this name may be given at any time (92). The church name is maintained as a secret name out of fear that knowledge of it may permit it to be used in conjunction with obeah and cause the bearer of the name harm. This distinction between sacred and profane names is paralleled in the geographically proximate case of St. Lucia (St. Lucia and Carriacou share a similar dual colonial history), and it could also be argued that it represents a Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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kind of alternative name patterning – with, of course, different social motivations for its maintenance than found in the case of Bastimentos. Regarding the maintenance of secrecy surrounding sacred names, Herskovits states: Names are given at stated periods in an individual’s life, and, as among all folk where magic is important, the identification of a ‘real’ name with the personality of its bearer is held to be so complete that this ‘real’ name, usually the one given him at birth by a particular relative, must be kept secret lest it come into the hands of someone who might use it in working evil magic against him. (1941:190) Cultural groups beyond the Americas also maintain discrete names based on a sacred0profane dichotomy motivated by secrecy. Clodd (1920:65) describes the secrecy associated with Sinhalese “rice names” as a safeguard against sorcery. Harrison 1990 describes the secrecy surrounding names and the power inherent in them that must be guarded in Papua New Guinea.18 Barbados and Bermuda Manning 1974 offers an insightful anecdote about trying in vain to locate an individual in Barbados by using his “official” name. Eventually, a woman realizes for whom Manning is searching and provides the man’s “nickname.” Bearing this new information, Manning retraces his steps using the new name as reference. He realizes that many of the locals he spoke to earlier indeed knew the individual in question, but only by what Manning calls a “nickname” (in my terms, an ethnic name).19 In Bastimentos, the Panamanian police rarely visit the island except to question an individual (almost always a male) regarding a crime or make an arrest. Often the police, nearly always Hispanophones and not of West Indian descent, reference only the individual’s “official” Spanish-derived name, perhaps out of ignorance or as an act of power. On more than one occasion, there was general confusion about the specific identity of the person the police were looking for until the individual’s ethnic name could be established by the community. I do not know how much of the “confusion” was actually resistance in the form of feigning ignorance in order to hinder the police (see Scott 1985:33–34 for feigned ignorance as a strategy of resistance). Manning’s article on names in Bermuda and Barbados offers other parallels to the Bastimentos case. For example, most of the nicknames for people in both locations are externally derived, having no phonetic or semantic relationship to the recipient’s original “official” name. Manning states that many of these names “are basically nonsensical and have no particular lexical content and a more-orless arbitrary relationship to their bearer” (124). We might argue that all names are arbitrary in that there is no natural, universal, or inherent semantic connection between a word (a sequence of sounds or gestures) and its referents, even if the motives and pattern for naming are transparent and can be easily explained (cf. n. 7 596

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for discussion of non-arbitrary names raised by Algeo 1973). In Bastimentos, this pattern is also revealed by ethnic names such as Yogo and Yaya. Manning adds, “Nicknames are normally acquired in youth . . . they tend to ‘stick’ to a person for life. Occasionally, a nickname or second nickname is gained in adulthood” (124– 125). In Bermuda, “nicknames” are so closely associated with an individual’s identity that they are listed in the telephone directory (124). In Barbados, “nicknames” are even attached to funeral notices because these are the names by which an individual was best known, and few people know a person’s original “official” name. One could make the case that these so-called nicknames distinguish these individuals as persons of African descent who speak their own language variety, which is symbolic of that specific culture. In other words, these alternative names, or “nicknames,” may appropriately be considered ethnic names. The Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia The largest part of Turner 1973 is a catalog of personal names and their possible African language etyma among the Gullahs of the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Turner describes the naming system of these English-derived creole speakers: Most of the Gullah people use two kinds of given names. One is English, and they call it their real name or true name and use it at school, in their correspondence, and in their dealings with strangers. The other is the nickname, known also as the pet name or basket name. In their homes and among their friends and acquaintances they use the nickname almost exclusively. In fact, so general is its use that many of the Gullahs have difficulty in recalling their English given-name. The nickname is nearly always a word of African origin. When not African it is likely to be an English word. (1973:40) This excerpt captures closely (aside from the African origin of the Gullah names) the pattern of naming found on Bastimentos as well. Turner continues, “The meanings of many of their names are not known . . . the sound of a word may be the sole reason for its being selected” (41– 42). We might again question whether any name that recipients have trouble recalling can accurately be called a “true” or “real” name, even if the speech community’s attitudes toward these specific cultural components are reflected by the use of these terms.20 Clearly, what Gullah speakers label as a “true” or “real” name is an “official” name, one found on documents and used for writing and literacy. It is more illuminating to consider the name used most often in reference and address (the “basket” or “pet” name) as the “real” name – or, more precisely, the ethnic name. Baird & Twining confirm that this system of alternative naming is still productive to some extent on the Sea Islands, though it seems in danger of passing into obsolescence: “The youngest of the bearers of the names are around twenty years old, but these are conspicuously few. The majority of the names are of persons thirty-five years of age or older” (1994:27). Baird & Twining insist that Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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basket names are given soon after birth, but that an additional (third) name may be acquired during adolescence or even later (23). This “nickname” may be derived from some “physical or temperamental characteristic or some incident in which the person has been involved. In any case, for Sea Islanders the nickname, basket name, or pet name by which an individual is known within the community is the owner’s operative personal name” (23). In many instances, Baird & Twining label the result of this naming process “a basket name or nickname” (e.g., 37). Thus, it is difficult to understand if the naming processes involved vary between giving a basket name, reportedly in the cradle, and giving a nickname at any point during childhood or even later. Nonetheless, the external routes by which basket names may be derived are no different than those for nicknames in general (28). Belize Ken Decker (personal communication, October 2000) has generously shared some of his preliminary data on names among Creole speakers in Belize. Belize is a multilingual area in which Creole English, English, Amerindian languages (e.g., Mayan, Carib), and Spanish are spoken in different combinations by different segments of the population; the official language is English. The Creole English of Belize descends historically from contact between African slaves and Anglophone European settlers who migrated from Bluefields in Nicaragua in the 18th century. In a pattern similar to that found among residents of Bastimentos, more recent Anglophone immigrants from the Western Caribbean have contributed to the form of Creole spoken today. Belizean Creole speakers have a rich system of ethnic names, though the specific language dynamic is different from the situation in Panama, where the official language is Spanish. Nonetheless, regarding their form, the nicknames (as Decker calls them) could just as well be from Bastimentos: Waga, Bo Rat, Ratti, Snake, Lion, Mose, Chuuku, Cat, Cacky, Cobo. Decker explains that this dual pattern of naming is mostly confined to males (which all his data reflect). When a female has another name, it is usually an internally derived contraction of her original name, as is often the case in Bastimentos. Decker adds that it is uncommon for a Creole speaker to have a Spanishderived alternative name of any kind. A LT E R N AT I V E N A M E S I N W E S T A F R I C A

Many of the studies just discussed assign the provenience of a specific regional and cultural naming system found among peoples of African descent in the Americas vaguely to West Africa, or simply to Africa. Little research has succeeded in assigning a geographically or ethnically defined naming practice in the Americas to a specific cultural or linguistic group in West Africa (see DeCamp 1967 and Kahn 1931 for two important exceptions). One primary reason for this uncertainty lies in the incomplete records of the importation of slaves from places in West Africa. It is often difficult to know exactly where an African slave in the Americas originated. What is known, if anything at all, is where individuals were 598

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purchased on the western coast of Africa. Turner 1973 is the most diligent and rigorous in assigning etyma to specific Gullah names from specific West African languages. However, even he is unable to assign the system of basket names used among Gullah speakers to a specific West African origin. We will not be any more successful here regarding the Creole speech community of Bastimentos. Mintz & Price write that “one must maintain a skeptical attitude toward claims that many contemporary social or cultural forms represent direct continuities from the African homelands” (1992:52). The discussion of “continuities,” “retentions,” or “survivals” from Africa often obscures the fact that there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between an African source and a similar feature’s subsequent emergence in the Americas. Convergence may be one of several factors making such a specific historical designation elusive. That is, if several but not necessarily all contributing African cultural components manifested generally similar naming practices, then these typological similarities would increase the chances that this feature would ultimately be maintained (and, of course, modified) in any subsequent system that emerged in the Americas; but one still would not be able to assign that practice to a single, specific, original contributing group. Convergence is a principle invoked in creole studies to understand how specific linguistic or cultural features, even marked (or uncommon) features, may be maintained in an emerging or creolizing language or culture. In short, the larger the number of composite cultures forming a matrix that share a given feature in a specific location, the greater the chances that this feature will be maintained or exhibited, in some similar but altered form, in the subsequent emerging culture (see Mufwene 1993 for references to convergence within the context of linguistic and cultural creolization). I tend to agree with Mintz & Price (1992:52– 60) that modification, adaptability, and change characterize any cultural group integrating elements from composite sources (African or otherwise), in contrast to an approach that views culture as frozen in time when transported from one geographical and cultural space to another. They write, “Direct formal continuities from Africa are more the exception than the rule in any AfricanAmerican culture” (60). This article is in no way concerned with proving or disproving African contributions to ethnic names in Bastimentos (it is unclear if it could even be done, in either case, in a rigorous and precise way), or in the various systems of alternative names found in other Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American speech communities discussed here. Since there is irrefutable historical and contemporary linguistic data indicating African influence in the Americas, one would not be surprised to find cultural retentions (albeit modified) from West Africa, such as the system of day-names described by DeCamp 1967 (see Cabrera 1970 for one example of West African religious survivals). However, that level of specificity – tracing the roots of a single cultural component of a specific ethnic group in the Americas to precise origins in West Africa – is, unfortunately, the exception rather than the Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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rule. I present some cross-cultural patterns in naming more as a way to understand the widespread human tendency to reference different social identities with alternative names than as an effort to locate the origins of ethnic names in Bastimentos, or in any other individual case (see n. 21 and below). The following studies discuss alternative names among peoples from the west coast of Africa. Though these are not “ethnic names” in the sense intended for the Afro-Panamanians of Bastimentos, they suggest a general cultural propensity toward multiple names. Herskovits believed that flexibility of names is an Africanism in general: “Among Africans, a person’s name may in so many instances change with time, a new designation being assumed on the occasion of some striking occurrence in his life, or when he goes through one of the rites marking a new stage in his development” (1941:190). (Compare this with the external routes by which nicknames may be derived.) Fortes 1955 examines naming practices among the Tallensi (the language has the same name and is part of the Gur language group) of Ghana. He reports, “A person can have, and very commonly does have two given names” (1955:339). One name is his “open or everyday name,” and the other is “his spirit-guardian name” (339). Fortes claims, “Naming customs of the kind I have described are found among all the tribes and peoples of Africa” (349). The Yoruba of Nigeria (and, to a lesser extent, in Benin and Togo) may have as many as five personal names: a birth name, given about a week after birth; a Christian or Muslim name from the Bible or Qur’an; a name that recipients give themselves or that is given to them as a result of some attribute; a praise name, a special name usually given by a child’s grandparents; and initials, usually the first letters of two or three of the previous names (Oyetade 1995:521). Johnson writes: “The use of the attributive name is so common that many children are better known by it than by their real names. Some do not even know their own real names when the attributive is popular” (1921:85) (cf. other cases discussed above in which recipients often could not remember their “real” names). The Ovimbundu of Angola have a fluid system of personal names. Hambly reports, “Children may change their own names at the age of about sixteen years, and actually do so if their names are distasteful to them” (1934:188). Childs is more unequivocal about the Ovimbundu: “In adolescence young people discard the names with which they were born and name themselves” (1969:87). Herskovits discusses at length the Dahomey people of what would be called Togo today. He writes: “Every exploit in a man’s life is signalized by the choice of a new name for himself, and a man’s position in a community is enhanced by his resourcefulness in originating for himself ingenious names” (1967:151). Furthermore, a child in Dahomean society can receive up to three names at birth, and additional names can be added in early adulthood (263–266). Alternative names in general (even ethnic names specifically) are not limited to the Caribbean or the larger Atlantic region. Similar naming systems have been documented in many societies in disparate regions of the world.21 In fact, it may 600

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be that alternative names are more the norm in many cultures than is usually realized. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Why would the residents of Bastimentos advertise so prominently their lack of Hispanophone roots by abandoning Spanish-derived given names in local contexts? The short answer is because ethnic names with their Creole-derived origins more closely index who they are in terms of language and cultural identity. That is, the general Panamanian social identity largely constructed in Spanish is less salient and relevant than the Creole component within the narrow Anglophone cultural sphere in which most residents of Bastimentos live, even approximately 150 years after this community was settled. Locally, the Creole-constructed identity is the most conspicuous, and thus it demands Creole-derived names and usage as one component of ethnic identity. What factors might account for how speakers focus on the social or ethnic groups with which they wish to identify? That is, what constraints might impinge on individual acts of social, ethnic, and linguistic identity, and what effect might these acts have on language choice, and thus on ethnic name usage? Le Page & Tabouret-Keller write: We can only behave according to the behavioral patterns of groups we find it desirable to identify with to the extent that: (i) we can identify the groups; (ii) we have both adequate access to the groups and ability to analyse their behavioural patterns; (iii) the motivation to join the groups is sufficiently powerful, and is either reinforced or reversed by feedback from the groups; (iv) we have the ability to modify our behaviour. (1985:182) In Bastimentos, strangers are not given Creole-derived ethnic names for use in reference and address at least until they identify the local speech community as Anglophone Creole speakers, achieve some proficiency in Guari-Guari (or some variety of English approximate to the Creole), and gain some familiarity or intimacy with local social groups in which they will possess these names for use in local contexts. In other words, not only do the four criteria described by Le Page & Tabouret-Keller affect language choice and thus ethnic name usage, among residents of Bastimentos; in addition, fieldworkers and outsiders in general are limited in their ability to gather data or witness ethnic name usage until they fulfill those criteria. This characterization certainly applied to me while I was conducting my own research. Of course, issues related to solidarity and power also function in Bastimentos society (see Brown & Gilman 1972). For example, outsiders often must participate in some act of solidarity with locals by speaking some form of English before ethnic names are divulged, since relatively few island residents are willing to initiate conversations in Spanish. Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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Price & Price (1972:357–358) suggest that, in Saramaka society specifically and in the Afro-Americas in general, some types of names are marked to be avoided in use with strangers or outsiders, and usage of those names may be circumscribed under the guises of etiquette and good manners. In Bastimentos, it is never a face-threatening act (Brown & Levinson 1987) simply to reference and address individuals by their ethnic names – and these names are in no way similar to “secret names” – as long as speakers fulfill the criteria described by Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, while being sensitive to issues of respect and politeness that all members of Bastimentos society manifest towards specific individuals (e.g., adhering to the diminishing custom of addressing elder residents by the titles Mister or Miss plus their Creole names). However, many formal social functions associated with public institutions on the island (e.g., school activities) are held exclusively in Spanish, and so the use of ethnic names is considered less appropriate in such “official” contexts. One possible social and economic motivation for the use of ethnic names is that most residents are more or less locally bound to the island through a combination of choice and poverty. Opportunities for economic and social mobility are quite restricted in the Bocas del Toro region, as they are in many areas of Panama. Local identity and language are most salient or dominant in local contexts because the Hispanophone component of Panamanian life offers few economic and social rewards to the residents of Bastimentos. In fact, many of them identify more strongly with (and have extended families in) other Anglophone West Indian communities farther north up the Caribbean coast in Puerto Limon and Manzanillo, Costa Rica, than with West Indian communities in the national centers of economic and political power in Panama City or Colon. Consequently, the ties of nationalism appear less vital than local ethnic identification that connects families sharing similar histories and cultures across international borders. Furthermore, the rewards of linguistic and social assimilation (and their purported economic benefits) are far less apparent and accessible in Bastimentos than they might be in more heavily Spanish-dominant spheres of Panamanian public life. When economic opportunities are few, the disadvantages of demarcating oneself ethnically and0or linguistically from the population at large are commensurately fewer. A natural prediction is that members of economically poorer social classes not only have different ways of speaking (or social class dialects), as has been clearly demonstrated throughout the sociolinguistics literature of the past 35 years, but also that alternative naming systems, of which ethnic names constitute one example, may emerge in these same communities. Residents of Ol’ Bank reference and address themselves as Anglophone West Indians through Creole language usage and the use of ethnic names because they are West Indians, and because there are no negative repercussions, social or economic, for doing so. In fact, in such an economically depressed area, there are only positive repercussions correlated with maintaining ethnic identity. On the other hand, Spanish (and, to some degree, varieties of American English) is viewed 602

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as a key to social and economic advancement in Panama. Thus, if residents of Bastimentos were to relocate to more intensively Hispanophone-dominated areas, we might expect this Creole language dominance (as well as the frequency and regularity of ethnic name usage) to shift in favor of the wider, Spanish-derived component of Panamanian identity (recall the immigrant naming processes discussed above and their relation to goals of assimilation). Though I have not empirically verified this prospective pattern, many residents of the island have confirmed it anecdotally when discussing the erosion of Guari-Guari usage among younger Anglophone speakers throughout Bocas del Toro. The contrast between official and ethnic names offers some insight into the linguistic, cultural, and historical dichotomies that the Bastimentos community negotiates daily, between largely Spanish-speaking Panama and the local community as part of the larger Anglophone Creole-speaking area of the Caribbean. Even the name of the island of Bastimentos exhibits this binary patterning: Bastimentos is its official Spanish name, but residents often refer it among themselves as Ol’ Bank.22 The vitality of alternative names in Bastimentos and in other Anglophone Creole-speaking areas of the Caribbean may be viewed as cultural maintenance or as a kind of resistance to the dominant culture. For more than a century, Afro-Panamanians of West Indian descent in Bastimentos have sought to keep alive their West Indian culture by maintaining Creole as the first language of the community, along with the ethnic naming system. However, residents still recognize the bureaucratic usefulness of utilizing Spanish names on official Panamanian government forms.23 Most likely, the documented cases of alternative naming systems discussed above are just the beginning of establishing this phenomenon of attaching discrete names to the multiple identities (ethnic or otherwise) that humans reference every day. Studies among non-Afro-Americans do not seem wholly different from the Afro-American or African cases (see n. 21). What appear as considerable differences in specific details may often obscure basic human cultural patterns. Specific cultural groups often create and maintain separate names for a range of social identities or to mark crucial events in their lives. My thesis is not that the residents of Bastimentos are somehow unique in their use of ethnic names. More important is the fact that this community reveals a naming system that has been developed, used, and maintained to signify minority ethnic and linguistic identities. Furthermore, it hardly seems controversial to hypothesize that, in many societies where several or many ethnicities function under the banner of a single national identity, a specific cultural group is likely to display ethnic or alternative names that contrast either etymologically or phonologically with those drawn from the ambient language of power. For example, many immigrants in the USA have Anglicized their names or adopted Anglophone names for exclusive use among English speakers, while maintaining original or ethnic names for ingroup usage. I have proposed that the cultural patterns displayed in the use and maintenance of ethnic names correlate with linguistic behavior associated with multilingualLanguage in Society 31:4 (2002)

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ism and diglossia in general. All linguistic tokens are socially marked and are “used by an individual because they are felt to have social as well as semantic meaning in terms of the way in which each individual wishes to project his0her own universe and invite others to share it” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985:247). Ethnic names are one component of the linguistic and cultural universe of Creole speakers in Bastimentos. NOTES

* A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in Washington, DC, January 2001. I am grateful to Jeffrey Williams, Ken Decker, Jane Hill, Nancy Dorian, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions. Any errors or shortcomings are, of course, mine alone. 1 There are also several speech communities of Amerindian languages such as Kuna and Guaymi, the Chinese languages Hakka and Cantonese, and Arabic, as well as some citizens who are familiar with varieties of American English. 2 Creole English emerged on San Andrés and Providencia in the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of British colonial activities in the western Caribbean, and, though the islands are currently controlled politically by Colombia, Anglophone Creole varieties are still spoken there today. 3 This unwillingness or inability to recognize Creole as the native language of the island contributes greatly to the difficulties many students experience at school. Even when Spanish language lessons are presented within the educational system, they are taught from a native language perspective and not as a second language. 4 Coincidentally, “signum” or “byname” is also found in Pulgram (1954:11) as roughly synonymous with the term “ethnic name” in this article. Dorian informs me (personal communication, September 2001) that she used the term “by-name” in her article because that was the label the locals in Scotland used in English to designate this category of alternative names. 5 In this article, “official” indicates a legal name that appears on government-issued documents such as a birth certificate, high school diploma, passport, or marriage license. 6 The folk etymology often associated with the word nickname has likely contributed to its perception as a reduced variant of a phonetically longer form via an internally derived route (e.g. Jeff , Jeffrey). The word nickname was originally ekename or ick-name. The archaic word eke “also” is related to the Old English verb ecan ‘to enlarge, to add to, to increase’, and only survives today, to my knowledge, in the expression ‘to eke out (e.g. a living)’ and in the compounded but altered form nickname under discussion here. Etymologically an “ekename” was an additional name, or by-name (Pulgram 1954:13), and not simply a reduced version of an original given name. When the morpheme eke (a Germanic form), was combined with name (a Romance word) in the Middle English period (approximately 11th to late 15th centuries), and preceded by the indefinite article, the morpheme boundary was subsequently reanalyzed by speakers to derive a nickname from an ekename. The prosthetic 0n-0 reanalyzed as the onset of the first syllable of nickname has allowed English speakers to assume (from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective) that the first morpheme is derived from the word nick ‘to cut or notch’. This association has often led English speakers to assume that a nickname is a contraction of a longer name. Though this reduced name pattern is certainly a subset of the entire phenomenon of nicknames, this type of nickname perhaps represents the least interesting or most transparent case. In most other instances, a nickname is phonetically unrelated to an individual’s given or official name and is derived via externally motivated routes discussed above. This misunderstanding of the etymology of nickname led Kohl & Hinton (1972:126) to assume that the nick- in nickname was a cut, nick, or attack on a recipient’s character. 7 Algeo (1973:57) labels as “nonarbitrary” what I have described as externally derived nicknames. He writes, “The usual function of the nickname is to suggest some characteristic of the person named, that is, to be nonarbitrary.” Clearly this assertion is only part of the phenomenon of nicknames, as the above discussion reveals. The only possible explanation for Algeo’s arbitrary0nonarbitrary distinction is that the motivations for many externally derived nicknames are often transparent. For example, if an obese person is named “Fats” (or “Slim,” for that matter), then to Algeo that reflects a nonarbi-

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trary nickname. However, this type of nickname is no less arbitrary than any internally derived nickname. Algeo (57) cites another example of nonarbitrary names in the case of day-names in Jamaica (also discussed above). The only insight I can discern in this designation of some (nick)names as nonarbitrary (or arbitrary) is that there is a transparent motivation or explanation for the derivation, etymology, or history of the name in question. However, if we break the creation of nicknames into the dichotomous pattern of internally and externally derived nicknames, the motivation for the creation of nearly all nicknames becomes transparent, and, I suppose, nonarbitrary from Algeo’s perspective. There may be some small subset of (nick)names that may appear arbitrary, but they only seem so because the motivation for the naming act is more opaque than other instances of naming, or perhaps because a specific name is based on euphony instead (e.g., the ethnic names Yaya and Yogo for Bastimentos). An arbitrary name may be considered one where the name is neither internally nor externally derived but only based on euphony, or what the name-giver subjectively finds pleasing to the ear. However, one may argue that this euphonious quality is most likely at play in the generation of all names (nicknames or otherwise), at least as far as the name-giver is concerned. This unmotivated distinction between arbitrary and nonarbitrary names will not be pursued further. 8 Bean continues, “What we call social dialect, for example, is an indexical sign of a social identity of the speaker” (1978:4). 9 For a more complete discussion of name changes among Black Muslims, consult Lincoln 1961. 10 In contrast, Spanish-language usage tends to invoke the usage of “official” Hispanophone first names. 11 In 1994, I was granted permission to attend and record what is locally called a Pocomia or Jump-Up ceremony (also known as Pocomania or Cumina in other parts of the Anglophone Caribbean; see Simpson 1978), in which Anglophone language varieties, Creole and otherwise, were the only languages spoken. 12 In Lipski 1989, the Afro-Panamanians in question are not the ancestors of Anglophone West Indians but the descendents of Spanish0Panamanian colonial slaves; see Cabrera 1970 for another case in Cuba. 13 The practice of assigning names according to the day on which a child is born is not limited to Twi-speaking cultures. The Igbo of Nigeria often name children twice. One name specifies the day on which the child is born, and the other name “is suggested by the display of some characteristic trait, or some resemblance, fancied or otherwise, to a deceased member of the family” (Basden 1966a:60). Basden writes of the Igbo, “Both boys and girls are given two or more names” (1966b:174). 14 It seems “indigenous” means “African” here rather than referring to the original Amerindian population of the West Indies. 15 The same confusion in the literature about what constitutes a “nickname” applies to Burton 1999. 16 Twi-derived day-names similar to those found in Jamaica are also found in Ndjuka society, e.g. Adjoba (cf. Juba in Jamaica) for a female born on Monday and Kodjo for a male born on the same day (171). 17 Kahn also refers to a system of secret names among the Ndjuka, which “is also prevalent among the Surinam Carib Indians” (170). Whether this secret naming custom was borrowed by the Ndjuka from local Amerindians or whether the Ndjuka influenced the Carib group of the area is unknown. 18 I am grateful to Jeffrey Williams for this reference. Kaganoff writes, “Jews also used both religious and secular names, first names as well as surnames. A Jew sometimes had one name in the Jewish community and another for civic and business purposes” (1977:18–19). This pattern of ethnic names in historic Jewish communities may actually be more salient to in-group usage (see Brown & Levinson 1987:107–12) than a sacred0profane distinction. 19 Jane H. Hill reports a similar instance in trying to locate Tohono O’odham Indians in Arizona by their Spanish-derived “official” baptismal names (personal communication, Sept 2001). 20 Speakers in Bastimentos sometimes call their English Creole “di bad inglish,” and while this local attitude cannot be linguistically justified or validated, it offers some insight into the lack of prestige that Guari-Guari has in Panama and in the larger Anglophone-speaking world. 21 Dorian 1970 examines name usage in a largely bilingual English0Gaelic community in Scotland in which the use of Gaelic correlates with ethnicity. Dorian writes, “The high incidence of identical names among Gaelic speakers in East Sutherland leads to the use of ‘by-names’ almost to the exclusion of official names” (303). Goodenough 1965 describes how it is common in the Lakalai community of Oceania for children to receive more than one name “for the place, time of year, Language in Society 31:4 (2002)

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weekday, or other event or circumstance associated with their birth” (269). Collier & Bricker 1970 describe the use of “nicknames” in Zinacantan, one of several Tzotzil-speaking groups in San Cristóbal las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Each Zinacanteco receives three names: a Spanish-derived first name, a Spanish-derived surname, and “a so-called Indian surname” (290). Nonetheless, the Zinacantecos have difficulty differentiating individuals on the basis of these first name and surname combinations (291). Consequently, a system of so-called nicknames has developed, which is used for reference “but never for direct address” (291) in order to reduce the ambiguity associated with the three sources of names noted. These “nicknames” are so productive that they often replace the Indian surname and subsequently become associated with family tree structures or genealogies. (It should be noted that Collier & Bricker call a “nickname” any subsequent name that does not fit the three categories of naming mentioned above.) Bean 1978 describes a complex system of address in a Kannada community in Bangalore, India. Some of the Kannada have nicknames, and, as is common with the true nicknames discussed above, these names often refer to an attribute or physical characteristic of the individual, usually an uncomplimentary one (88, 93, 97), though there are what she calls “neutral or complimentary nicknames” (93) as well. Kannada nicknames are typically acquired during childhood, which is a defining characteristic discussed in the typology above, but they can be used to address and reference younger adults as well (106). 22 I have been told that other Creole-speaking communities in Panama exhibit this same cultural and linguistic pattern, but I have not yet confirmed it empirically. 23 Alternative names are not without pragmatic considerations. Many members of the Nation of Islam often retain their earlier names for official administrative purposes such as voting, bank accounts, or passports, in order to obtain a range of public services, unless a legal name change has been obtained (Lincoln 1961). Malcolm X assumed the surname Shabazz so that he might travel abroad without having to reference his previous surname, Little.

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