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

6. Case study in Amsterdam 
 
To show how the presence of proper names affects the diversity in the linguistic 
landscape, two different analyses of approximately 200 signs from Amsterdam’s main 
shopping street are presented.
Amsterdam is the national capital and also the biggest city of the Netherlands 
with more than 743,000 inhabitants (2006). The population consists of various ethnic 
groups: 52% is Dutch and the others are immigrants from the former Dutch colony 
Surinam (9%), Morocco (9%), Turkey (5%), etc. Every year millions of tourists visit 
Amsterdam. The largest groups are from Great Britain and the United States (O+S 
Amsterdam, 2004). This stream of foreign tourists and the process of globalisation 
promote the use of English in the centre of Amsterdam. 
Dutch is the only official language in the Netherlands, apart from the province 
of Fryslân, where Frisian also has official status. 87% of the Dutch claim to be able to 
participate in a conversation in English. Of this group, 90% consider their skills to be 
good or very good (Eurobarometer, 2006). However, their actual competence may not 
be all that good as Van Onna and Jansen (2006) found that Dutch employees 
systematically overestimate their own proficiency in English according to the 
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. 
Kalverstraat is the main shopping street in the centre of Amsterdam. As a 
survey area, a section of this street was chosen, namely the section adjacent to Dam 
square, a popular tourist attraction. Fourteen shops are included in the sample: six 
clothes shops, two shoe shops, a pharmacy, and individual shops selling cosmetics, 
sunglasses and watches, mobile phones, gifts, and art.
Pictures were taken of all the signs in the survey area in March 2005. In 
accordance with Backhaus (2006: 55), a sign was considered to be “any piece of 
written text within a spatially definable frame [...] including anything from 
handwritten stickers to huge commercial billboards”. The data collection comprises a 
total of 202 signs. 
These signs were coded twice according to a number of variables, including the 
language(s) used on the sign. In analysis A, proper names were left out of 
consideration under the assumption that they cannot be ascribed to a specific 
language. After all, as Bade (2006) argues, names like Zheng He are not in a language 
at all; Zheng He is Zheng He in any language the reader understands. In analysis B, 
however, proper names were treated as other words. 
Figure 3 is a picture of a shop sign in Kalverstraat that reads Yves Rocher. On 
the sign this name stands on its own, and thus it can be seen as decontextualized. 
Because of its shape and perhaps its origin, many would perceive it as a French name. 
However, this depends on the reader’s knowledge of languages. A reader who has 
little or no knowledge of the French language may categorize the name differently. A 
Dutch inhabitant of Amsterdam might just as well perceive it as Dutch and pronounce 

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it accordingly; a British tourist could perceive it as English. In the analyses these 
possible classifications are left aside. In analysis A, this sign is left out of 
consideration, as it only contains a proper name. In analysis B, it is a monolingual 
French sign. 
Figure 4 is a picture of a shop sign displaying the names Sunglass Hut and 
Watch Station. These names do not stand on their own: the sign also contains the 
Dutch words zonnebrillen (‘sunglasses’) and horloges (a loan word from French 
meaning ‘watches’). In analysis A, it is regarded as a monolingual Dutch sign as the 
proper names are left out of consideration. In analysis B, it is a bilingual English-
Dutch sign. 
Figure 3. Shop sign with a French name 
Figure 4. Shop sign with English names 
The cosmetics brand Yves Rocher was named after the French entrepreneur who 
founded it. Thus, the brand and shop name Yves Rocher derives from another proper 
name, viz the name of a person. The shop names Sunglass Hut and Watch Station, on 
the other hand, have been composed of common nouns. Therefore, labelling Yves 
Rocher French may be more controversial than labelling Sunglass Hut and Watch 
Station English. If these names occurred in mainly Dutch job advertisements, 
Korzilius et al. (2006) would not count Yves Rocher as French words, but as Dutch, 
since in their view, this name is a given. They would classify Sunglass and Watch as 
English, since these are meaningful English words, and Hut and Station as Dutch, 
because these words also appear in the Dutch dictionary (Van Meurs, personal 
communication). 
Figure 5 combines the results for analysis A and B in one diagram. Note that a 
sign containing both Dutch and English, like the sign in figure 4, is represented in 
both bars. Therefore the numbers in the bars add up to more than 202, the total 
number of signs. The lower parts of the bars show the number of occurrences of 
particular languages on a sign if proper names are excluded from the analysis. The 
upper parts show the number of occurrences that are added to this if proper names are 
included in the analysis. The first bar, for instance, demonstrates that 82 monolingual 
or multilingual signs contain Dutch text excluding proper names. 99 signs (82+17) 
contain Dutch text if proper names are included in the analysis. 17 signs contain one 
or more proper names in Dutch but no other Dutch text. 

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Figure 5. Distribution of languages on signs in Kalverstraat 
82
40
5
17
55
42
0
20
40
60
80
100
Dutch
English
Other
languages
abs.
Analysis B (proper
names)
Analysis A (text
excluding proper names)
In both analyses, Dutch and English play the most important role in the linguistic 
landscape. However, if proper names are included, the proportion of English and 
other languages is much larger than if they are excluded. Thus, including and 
excluding proper names result in very different outcomes. The label ‘other languages’ 
comprises German, Chinese, French and Japanese in analysis A (5 occurrences) while 
in analysis B (47 occurrences) Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and Swahili are added. 
If proper names are excluded from the analysis, 79 of the signs (39%) are left aside as 
they contain no text but proper names. Examples of proper names in Kalverstraat are 
given below. The use of upper and lower case reflects the original typography. 
De Tuinen 
(Dutch, shop name) 
van DALEN
(Dutch, family name of resident) 
IZZY BIZZY
 
 
(English, shop name) 
Orange 
 
 
 
(English, brand name) 
PUR DÉSIR de MIMOSA 
 
(French, product name) 
And the following are examples of other text in Kalverstraat: 
Fietsen worden verwijderd
(Dutch, ‘Bicycles will be removed’) 
KUNSTHANDEL 
(Dutch, ‘art shop’) 
AUTHORIZED DEALER 
 
(English) 
NEW collection 
 
 
(English) 
Skulptur in Bronze 
 
 
(German, ‘sculpture in bronze’) 
Of course proper names and other text are often combined, for instance: 
Gezond Voordeel bij De Tuinen 
(Dutch, ‘healthy profit at De Tuinen’) 
It can be concluded that proper names contribute greatly to the multilingual 
appearance of the linguistic landscape. 

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