Individuals or families migrating between countries and starting a new life abroad has been a constant throughout human history. Sometimes, the migrants have children in the new host country; usually these children are then raised bilingually. Earlier studies show that in these cases, the children usually receive names common either in the country where they were raised, or the one(s) their parents migrated from. However, these studies typically do not analyse how this naming choice would affect second-generation individuals later in life, despite names being one of the earliest ways for individuals to form a cultural identity.

The study aims to determine how the names of bilingual high school students tie together with which names they would give their hypothetical children, using a survey aimed at such students living in Halmstad, Sweden. The names of both students and their hypothetical children were categorised as “marked” or “unmarked”, judging by how many by similar names were born in Sweden, both during the years 1998-2000 and 2016-18.

Out of the students that answered the survey, 45 of them were bilingual; out of them, 80% had “marked” first names, i.e. names which would be seen as unusual/foreign in Sweden. However, they suggested a total of 79 names for their future children, and out of those suggestions, 70% would be considered “marked” – a decrease of 10 percent, despite the larger name pool involved. There was also a notable difference in naming habits based on gender: very few of the students with “unmarked” names were male, but the surveyed group suggested a balanced amount of female and male unmarked names for their own children.