The Names of Virtual Communities: A Linguistic cum Socio-Onomastic Analysis

Abstract

The naming pattern, in general, provides information about social status, class, caste, gender, region, nationality and other related affiliations. With the advent of Internet and computer mediated interaction there has emerged an ever multiplying network of people cutting, across geographies, gender and race. Consequently, virtual communities have succeeded into reality. They may be termed 'electronic tribes' as their interactions are mediated by Internet and computers. These communities, basically existing as websites, have a short history but a considerable membership, often breaching the millionth mark. Names in virtual landscape reveal a lot. Resolve, expertise, affiliation, interests, intentions and what not? This paper intends to study the naming patterns of the virtual communities or Social Networking Sites (hereafter, SNS) from sociolinguistic and semantic points of view. We have looked into the social and historical aspects of naming of these sites and tried to study the question of identity in real versus virtual world. The structure of this paper is as follows: The abstract follows an introduction to Onomastics and Virtual Communities and a discussion on why virtual communities for the study on naming. The next section deals with some social networking sites that have existed as most popular according to the parameters such as number of followers, visitors’ counts, online surveys etc. Finally, we have compared the naming patterns of these websites and analyzing the linguistic and socio-onomastic factors involved in naming them. Taking representative samples of SNS names from various domains such as academics, business, entertainment, games, health, friendship, travel etc. we have observed how the naming pattern itself is experiencing a sea change.