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In:Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 253–276

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Chapter 10
Tagoi birth names

A historical change from African to Islamic/Arabic names

 | University of Khartoum
 | Sultan Qaboos University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 February 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.10bas
Abstract
Among many groups of the Nuba Mountains, personal names denote birth order, i.e., whether a child is the first, second, third, etc., among their siblings. Tagoi, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the north-eastern Nuba Mountains, shows such a naming system. Tagoi children receive another name, used in official documents and associated with certain birth practices. Over time, these non-order-based names have been adapted to an Islamic/Arabic naming system based on days of the week. Birth-order names were retained for some time after Islamization and Arabicization, but factors including urbanization and education have led to the gradual loss of both types of names. This paper describes the Tagoi naming system in its sociohistorical context and considers these names from linguistic and anthropological perspectives.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Birth-order names in cross-linguistic perspective
    • 1.2Day-of-the-week names in cross-linguistic perspective
    • 1.3Outline of this chapter
  • 2.Tagoi language and area
  • 3.The history of Tagoi origin: An oral tradition perspective
  • 4.History of contact with Islam and Arabs
  • 5.Islamization and Arabization of Tagoi
  • 6.Birth-order names
  • 7.Non-order official names
  • 8.Islamic/Arabic day-of-the-week names
  • 9.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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