The volume seeks to establish socio-onomastics as a field of linguistic inquiry not only within sociolinguistics, but also, and in particular, within pragmatics. The linguistic study of names has a very long history, but also a history sometimes fraught with skepticism, and thus often neglected by linguists in other fields. The volume takes on the challenge of instituting onomastic study into linguistics and pragmatics by focusing on recent trends within socio-onomastics, interactional onomastics, contact onomastics, folk onomastics, and linguistic landscape studies. The volume is an introduction to these fields – with the introductory chapter giving an overview of, and an update on, recent onomastic study – and in addition offers detailed in-depth analyses of place names, person names, street names and commercial names from different perspectives: historically, as well as from the point of view of the impact of globalization and glocalization. All the chapters focus on the use and function of names and naming, on changes in name usage, and on the reasons for, processes in, and results of names in contact.

Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University, on Linguist List 29.3569:
The volume as a whole provides an interesting and refreshing view of onomastics; the geographical focus on Finland and its Nordic neighbors brings the unexpected benefit of a view of the linguistic diversity, language contacts, and ongoing globalization that have shaped one area of the world. [...] Socio-onomastics should clearly prove of interest to scholars of names and naming, but also to those in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.