What’s in a Name? Classification of Proper Names by Language

Zheng He in whatever language.” 
In other words, proper names can be part of any language, depending on the context 
in which they occur. In the book Bade discusses, the name Zheng He has been left 
unchanged, whether it occurs in a German, French or English context. Thus, Zheng 
He remains recognizable as an originally Chinese name and keeps its foreign flavour. 
Put differently, Zheng He is in any context a Chinese proper name, but not necessarily 
a proper name in Chinese, depending on the linguistic context. 
Crystal (2003) poses a question similar to the issues raised here, namely if 
proper names are part of the lexicon. Although proper names are usually not counted 
as true vocabulary, he argues, there is a sense in which they are part of the learning of 
a language. French speakers learning English have to learn to replace Londres by 
London. They also have to learn the pronunciation and grammar of proper names. 
Some names are part of the idiomatic history of a language community and some have 
taken on an additional meaning. Some proper names, often having a language-specific 
form, are felt to belong to a language (e.g., the English Christmas, January, the 
Moon) whereas others are felt to be independent of any language (e.g. Alpha 
Centauri, Diplodocus, Helen Keller). Crystal concludes that proper names are on the 
boundary of the lexicon. 
So far, in linguistic landscape research (Backhaus, 2006; Barni, 2006; Ben-
Rafael et al., 2006; Cenoz and Gorter, 2006; El-Yasin and Mahadin, 1996; Huebner, 
2006; Schlick, 2003) proper names are not considered a problem for language 
classification. Implicitly, they seem to be treated in the same way as any other word 
appearing on the signs. Schlick (2003) lists the texts on the shop signs she 

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investigated and the way they have been coded. The fact that names such as MARKS 
& SPENCER have been coded as English, ADOLFO DOMINGUEZ as Spanish and 
Parfümerie Douglas as German and English shows that Schlick has chosen to assign 
proper names to their original language. 
In their - methodologically very transparent - chapter on the use of English in 
job advertisements in a Dutch newspaper, Korzilius et al. (2006: 174) do make their 
classification of proper names explicit: 
“An English proper name was not analyzed as an English word (unless it was used in 
a completely English job ad), because in the case of names there is usually no choice 
between a Dutch and an English variant, since the name of a person o[r] an 
organization is usually ‘a given’. However, if the name of an organization or a 
department contained meaningful English words, these were counted as English 
words, since in these cases the use of English is a matter of choice.”
For example, “‘Johnson & Johnson’ was not considered to contain any English words. 
‘t for Telecom’ was considered to contain two English words: ‘for’ and ‘Telecom’” 
(Korzilius et al., 2006: 174). 
To put it differently, Korzilius et al. (2006) do not classify a company name 
that derives from other English names (Johnson & Johnson) as English while they do 
classify a company name that has been composed of English common nouns (t for 
Telecom) as English. Words that are not analysed as English, for example Johnson & 
Johnson, are considered to be Dutch by the authors. 
In how far are names that derive from other names indeed a given? If the 
family name Johnson had had a negative connotation, the company might not have 
been named after its founders but could have been given another name. In that sense, 
the use of English in the company name Johnson & Johnson can actually be seen as a 
matter of choice for the founders. Moreover, the distinction between names that do 
and do not contain meaningful English words seems quite subjective. All in all, the 
methodology developed by Korzilius et al. (2006) does not seem to be a satisfactory 
solution to the problem of the classification of proper names. 
Inevitably, the coding of texts is not completely objective as it depends on the 
knowledge of the researcher. Bade (2006) gives an example of this. One of the 
subtitles of the above-mentioned book about Zheng He is Images & Perceptions. Due 
to the ampersand, this title may be interpreted either as English (‘Images and 
Perceptions’) or as French (‘Images et Perceptions’). The interpretation depends on 
which language(s) the indexer knows. 
Entrepreneurs sometimes play with these double interpretations. A boat 
company that organises canal cruises in Amsterdam and Utrecht is called Lovers, a 
Dutch family name, which probably means ‘messenger’ (Brouwer, 2000-2007). 
Foreign tourists, who typically take these canal cruises, are likely to interpret this 
name as the English common noun ‘lovers’. The company reinforces this 
interpretation, probably because of its romantic connotation, with a heart in its logo 
(see Figure 2). Actually, the ambiguity only exists in the written form of the word as 
the Dutch and the English reading differ in pronunciation: Dutch /lo:vәrs/ versus 
English /lςvә(r)z/. When phoning the company, one is welcomed by the answering 
machine in Dutch and in English. In both languages, the name of the company is 
pronounced in the Dutch way. 

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Figure 2. Logo of canal cruise company Lovers 
(Originally, the edges and shadows are blue and the heart is red.) 
The examples given in this section show that it is difficult to give a decisive answer to 
the question how proper names should be classified by language.