Continuing the

Abstract

The first two phases of the “Family Names of the United Kingdom” [FaNUK] project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, set out to explain the origin of all surnames found in Britain and Ireland that had more than 20 bearers in 1881 and/or more than 100 in 2011. The fruits of the first funded phase (2010–2014) were published as The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2016). Many surnames had never been explained at all before FaNUK, and given the wealth of new or corrected explanations achieved by the project, and the huge volume of collected and/or e-accessible material now available, deeper analysis is both possible and timely. The aim of the possible further project that we describe here will be to address the theme of variation in the form of surnames. This situates the project primarily within the fields of English historical sociolinguistics and socioonomastics, while relevant to history and demography. Its scope will be unified by the idea of analysing non-canonical changes in English, specifically the following five types: variation as an unstandardized consequence of mechanical or acoustic phonetic processes typical of informal speech (such as unstressed vowel reduction); variation of a particular under-studied phonoorthographic type involving vowel length (as in Sim vs. Sime); variation endemic in unstandardized aspects of English orthography (as in Lee vs. Leigh); variation due to analogy with other names or name elements locally or nationally, and with words of the common vocabulary; and any aspects of hypercorrection and spelling-pronunciation not implicitly covered in the above. This will lead naturally to devoting attention to the phonological and orthographical techniques employed in anglicizing names arriving from abroad, thereby linking the present paper to the conference sub-theme of identity and naming.