A socio-political study of gendered proper names in Palestine

This article examines the gendered aspects of naming practices in Palestine. We study the personal names of the new generation in relation to name derivations and motivations in order to identify the emerging sociological aspects of naming practices in the West Bank of Palestine. We collected the names of the registered births over the last 10 years from local hospitals as well as the names of the parents, classified the names into separate categories and conducted structured online interviews with a random sample of parents from different areas in the West Bank of Palestine so as to elicit their motivation for giving their children the names chosen here. We classify the names into semantic categories and use these categories to disclose the motivations of the names using the premises of the socio-onomastic theory. The study concludes that the males in the study group are still given traditional names while females are given fashionable and foreign names that show the influence of the Western culture on the Palestinian people and the concern of Palestinians with females' beauty which promotes their future marriageability rather than with their being as autonomous subjects.