Abstract

Based on the idea that names have not only a referential-indexical meaning but also a social-indexical meaning, this article uses empirical evidence from a corpus of guided interviews to show which social attributions are associated with names in migration in interaction situations. The corpus consists of 130 interviews on the topic of multilingualism and integration with respondents whose first language(s) is/are Turkish, Arabic and German, as well as a smaller group (N = 5) of short sociolinguistic interviews on group membership. The analysis of the narrative reconstruction of biographical experiences with names interpreted/used as migrant names shows that names serve to categorise and position individuals in social space; it further reveals that the social indexical potential of names varies depending on the nature of the situation, interaction and function, revealing ‘orders of indexicality’ (Silverstein 2003).