Abstract

Beyond identifying individuals, personal names indicate social categories and flag someone as belonging to a certain ethnic group. In turn, names may serve as an important means for (re)constructing identities and for positioning within sociolinguistic spaces. This article focuses on assimilation vs. ethnic maintenance in terms of name choices among German descendants in Denmark in the 19th/20th c., a period of transition from a multicultural and multilingual German-Danish speaking society to the Danish nation-state. The study reveals gender-specific differences in ethnic boundary marking and the impact of the socio-political context, in particular the German-Danish war of 1864 and the Second World War