The names Francinaldo and Florisvalda share more than just their initial letter. “These are both typically Brazilian names, created by fusing two elements taken from traditional names,” explains Juliana Soledade, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and author of the book Os brasileiros e seus nomes: Teoria e história da antroponímia no Brasil (Brazilians and their names: Theory and history of anthroponymics in Brazil; Pontes Editores, 2024). “Brazil has developed unique naming practices that differ sharply from, say, the Portuguese system, where names must be selected from an official name list controlled by the government. Unfortunately, these distinctly Brazilian names are often stigmatized and frowned upon—yet they perfectly reflect the creativity of Brazilian culture.”
Soledade notes that Brazilian naming practices have borrowed from the dithematic structure of Germanic names, inherited via Portuguese colonizers. “Typically, Germanic names are built by combining two common words to create a new, third meaning. Take Edward, for instance, formed from ead (‘wealth, happiness’) and weard (‘guardian, ward’), yielding ‘guardian of wealth.’ Or Bernard, from ber (‘bear’) and hard (‘strong, hardy’), meaning something like ‘strong bear’ or ‘strong as a bear,’” Soledade explains. “In Brazil, people started creating new combinations with name fragments. So, for example, José, a Hebrew name, merges with naldo, a Germanic-derived suffix, to form Josenaldo—though in this case, there’s no clear meaning we can infer from the combination.”
Until the late nineteenth century, most given names officially used in Brazil followed a Luso-Judeo-Christian tradition, according to Soledade. This began to shift with the passage of Decree no. 9,886, as part of the 1888 Constitution, which stripped the Catholic Church of its exclusive control over birth, marriage, and death certificates. “Another key moment was the abolition of slavery. Freed individuals sought to break away from the names associated with the white elite, creating new naming possibilities,” says Soledade. She is currently leading the development of the Novo dicionário de nomes em uso no Brasil (New dictionary of names in use in Brazil), a national project she launched in 2017 while teaching at the University of Brasília (UnB).
Sandra Jávera
Soledade’s research falls within the field of onomastics, the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of proper names—especially personal names (anthroponymics) and place names (toponymics). “It’s a highly interdisciplinary field, drawing on law, history, sociology, psychology, and geography,” adds Patricia Carvalhinhos of the School of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Humanities at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP).
According to Carvalhinhos, onomastics established itself as a formal academic discipline in the nineteenth century, led by French historian and archivist Auguste Longnon (1844–1911). “But debates about names go back to Antiquity. Even Plato mused about the nature of names, as seen in the dialogue Cratylus,” she says. One of the early pioneers in the Portuguese language was the Lusitanian philologist José Leite de Vasconcelos (1858–1941), best known for his work Antroponímia portuguesa (Portuguese anthroponymics; 1928). In Brazil, one of the seminal works is Antenor Nascentes’s (1886–1972) Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa (Etymological dictionary of the Portuguese language; 1952), on the origins of proper names.
Within academia, the first significant studies on the subject in Brazil were published in the early twentieth century. A notable example is the work of Plínio Ayrosa (1895–1961), who held the chair of Ethnography and Tupi-Guarani Language at the University of São Paulo (USP). He authored titles like Termos tupis no português do Brasil (Tupi terms in Brazilian Portuguese; 1937). “Toponymics was one of the methods he used to better understand Indigenous languages,” notes Carvalhinhos. But the field would only gain traction in Brazil in the 1990s, with the work of scholars like Maria Vicentina de Paula do Amaral Dick (1936–2024), also at USP. “In her doctoral dissertation, defended in 1980 and published in 1992, she adapted to the Brazilian context a methodology based on semantic fields—a conceptual approach that had been applied internationally since the 1950s,” says Carvalhinhos. “Put simply, this method involves breaking down reality into categories to better grasp its particularities. For example, you might classify Brazilian city names into two broad groups: those inspired by nature and those based on human-made artifacts. From there, you can create subcategories and so on.”
The Parkatêjê people, in southeastern Pará, call the Tocantins River Pyti, which means “lots of annatto.”
Eduardo Amaral, from the School of Languages and Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), believes there is still significant ground to cover in this field in Brazil—especially in anthroponymics. Together with Márcia Seide, of the State University of Western Paraná (UNIOESTE), he cofounded the Onomastic Observatory (O-Onoma) in 2020, a national network for cross-institutional research exchange and collaboration. Last year, the group—which includes scholars from over 20 Brazilian universities—released the book Os nomes próprios no Brasil: Contribuições do Observatório Onomástico (O-Onoma) (Proper names in Brazil: Contributions from the Onomastic Observatory [O-Onoma]), published by Pontes Editores.
Trained in both law and linguistics, Amaral has researched various categories of proper names, with support from the Minas Gerais State Research Foundation (FAPEMIG). One of these categories is chosen names, officially recognized in Brazil by Decree no. 8,727, enacted in 2016. This decree provides the right for people to use a name in public settings that reflects their gender identity, even if it differs from the one on their civil documents. “Chosen names—or the names that transgender or nonbinary individuals prefer to go by—began to receive official recognition in Brazil in the early 2000s,” Amaral explains. “They were first adopted in the healthcare system, helping to avoid awkward or discriminatory situations for LGBT+ people in hospitals and other public facilities. Later, they expanded into education, at universities and schools.” Amaral adds, “Unfortunately, unlike countries such as Spain and Argentina, Brazil doesn’t yet have a permanent law providing this right. Remember, a federal decree can be revoked by a presidential signature at any time.”
With funding from FAPESP, Letícia Rodrigues explored the history and use of Portuguese surnames in Brazil in a doctoral dissertation defended in 2024 at FFLCH-USP. She based her research on records from the Brás Immigrant Hostel in São Paulo, covering arrivals between 1887 and 1889, and on passports from Portuguese emigrants who traveled to Brazil between 1888 and 1890—documents she accessed while serving as a visiting scholar at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. She also consulted the list of candidates who passed the first round of the FUVEST university entrance exam in 2017.
Altogether, Rodrigues compiled about 50,000 surnames, but narrowed her focused analysis to around 1,700 entries. “The difference in numbers is mainly because many surnames appear in multiple spelling variants—as with “Queirós” and “Queiroz,” Rodrigues explains. She is currently working on an etymological onomastic dictionary of Portuguese surnames in use in Brazil.
Sandra Jávera
“Some surnames are tied to nature, like Pereira (‘pear tree’) and Oliveira (‘olive tree’), while others have religious origins, such as Trindade (‘Trinity’) and Rosário (‘Rosary’). There are also animal-based names, like Cordeiro (‘lamb’), Coelho (‘rabbit’), and Sardinha (‘sardine’), and trade names such as Ferreiro (‘blacksmith’), Machado (‘axe’), and Monteiro (‘mountain man’),” she says. “Lacerda comes from the Spanish expression la cerda, referring to a tuft of bristly hair that would stick out of a shirt at chest level, while Pestana describes a person with long eyelashes.”
Since completing her linguistics degree in 2014 at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Tereza Tayná Coutinho Lopes has been investigating the language and cultural practices of the Parkatêjê people, an Indigenous community in southeastern Pará. “In their naming convention, the name-giver selects a personal trait—either positive or negative—from their own character and uses it as the basis for the new name,” explains Lopes, now a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Pará (IFPA). One example is the name Kokupati, meaning “fear of water.” “It’s a personal name passed down by a name-giver known for their own fear of water—a trait meant to be remembered by future generations through the name itself,” she adds.
In her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2022 within the Graduate Program in Language and Literature at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Lopes investigated the place-naming traditions (toponymics) of the Parkatêjê people. “Some of these names are purely descriptive,” she explains. “For instance, the village Kojakati means ‘white or clear water,’ a reference to the characteristics of a nearby stream.”
Sandra Jávera
Other names capture elements of Parkatêjê culture. “The Parkatêjê call the Tocantins River Pyti, which means ‘a lot of annatto,’” Lopes says. “This is linked to a local creationist myth. According to the story, when the Indigenous people first inhabited the region, they found abundant annatto seeds. They crushed the seeds and threw them into the river, staining its waters. The river thus took on the color of annatto, which plays an important role in Parkatêjê culture.”
Lopes is a member of the UFPA research group Functional-Descriptive Studies of Parkatêjê and Other Minority Languages, which deals, among other issues, with the preservation of the personal names and place names of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples. “Among the Parkatêjê, younger generations are increasingly struggling to preserve their traditional language,” Lopes notes. “With Portuguese as Brazil’s dominant language, it’s mainly the elders who still carry the ancestral knowledge of the people’s myths, cultural practices, and native language fluency.”
Place names play an important role in shaping collective memory, but in recent years, Brazil’s major cities have seen naming rights disrupt this heritage. “Naming rights attach a commercial brand’s name to a public space, like a soccer stadium or a subway station,” explains Martin Jayo, a professor at the School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH) at the University of São Paulo (USP) and coauthor of a study on the topic.
Last year, São Paulo’s municipal government and a multinational food and beverage company were on the verge of closing a naming rights deal for Largo da Batata, a town square in the city’s west side. The idea was to temporarily add the name of one of the company’s potato chip brands to the square’s name. However, after public backlash, the city withdrew from the deal. “We care for our physical landmarks—we protect historic buildings—but in Brazil, names themselves are a kind of cultural heritage we tend to ignore,” Jayo points out.
The story above was published with the title “In every sense” in issue in issue 349 of march/2025.
Project
Immigration journeys: Surnames that tell stories (nº 19/20331-8); Grant Mechanism Doctoral Fellowship; Supervisor Mário Eduardo Viaro (USP); Beneficiary Leticia Santos Rodrigues; Investment R$201,057.04.
Scientific articles
CARVALHINHOS, P. e LIMA, A. T. Toponímia, teoria e método. Retratos de tradição e inovação. Revista Linha D’Água, Vol. 36, pp. 1–20. 2023.
LOPES, T. T. C. & FERREIRA, M. de N. O. Língua, identidade e cultura: Aspectos semânticos da toponímia Parkatêjê (Timbira). EntreLetras, no. 15, pp. 251–68. 2024.
JAYO, M. & LIMA, A. T. Comodificação toponímica e a cidade neoliberal: Sobre a venda de direitos de nomeação (naming rights) das estações do metrô de São Paulo. Domínios de Lingu@gem, Uberlândia, Vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 347–70. 2021.
Book
AMARAL, E. T. R. et al. Os nomes próprios no Brasil: Contribuições do Observatório Onomástico (O-Onoma). Campinas: Pontes Editores, 2024.
SOLEDADE, J. O brasileiro e seus nomes: Teoria e história da antroponímia no Brasil. Campinas: Pontes Editores, 2024.
SOLEDADE, J. & SIMÕES NETO, N. A. (Eds.) Nomes próprios: Abordagens linguísticas. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2021.
Book chapter
CARVALHINHOS, P. “Onomastics and Toponomastics.” In: KABATEK, J. & WALL, A. (Ed.). Manual of Brazilian Portuguese Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, vol. 21, pp. 513–52.
