Katarzyna Aleksiejuk

Personal naming on the Internet has so far received only modest interest in the field of name studies. Work in this field has presented general descriptions of this phenomenon and categorisations (Bechar-Israeli, 1995; Kołodziejczyk, 2004; Naruszewicz-Duchlin´ska, 2003; Rutkiewicz, 1999; Sidorova, 2006; Swennen, 2001; Van Langendonck, 2007). However, research on usernames, although still not sizeable, constitutes an important element of the study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and Internet linguistics. I would like to offer an overview of the literature to date related to naming practices on the Internet that I find representative of an array of viewpoints and approaches applied in this field, to see how personal naming works online, and to demonstrate selected similarities between online and offline naming practices.

In this article, I would like to suggest how usernames in the form of personal names might be read as a means of identity performance. The approach that I propose is to analyse them in terms of social distance and familiarity, similarly to address and reference terms used in off-line communication. By using the example of forum Посиделки (Gatherings) I am going to demonstrate how particular forms of personal names functioning as usernames may influence audience's perception of the named as well as the character of relationship between the interlocutors in CMC.

Anthroponyms in virtual environments function as primary devices used to construct, validate, and assess identity. Studies of themed environments have revealed a connection between the context and identities, demonstrated in recurrent patterns in name selection. For example, Stommel (2007), in ' " Mein Nick bin ich! " Nicknames in a German Forum on Eating Disorders', reveals frequent references to recognisable attributes of anorexia—such as smallness, weightlessness, and childishness—while Del-Teso-Craviotto (2008), in 'Gender and Sexual Identity Authentication in Language Use', reports that in dating chat-rooms participants' names often feature desirable physical attributes of stereotypical male and female identities, in order to construct images of attractive bodies. In contrast, Posidelki ('Gatherings'), a non-themed social forum on the Russian-speaking Internet, is not addressed to any specific category of participant, or restricted to a particular purpose of communication, and therefore lacks such a clear context-related point of reference. In this environment independent clusters of usernames can be observed, which display varied concepts of identities— revealing both national and foreign influences, and expressing attachment to tradition as well as an aspiration to be up to date with worldly trends which can be seen as a sign of the process of identity re-definition in the post-Soviet era.

This study analyses metadiscourse produced by Computer-mediated communication (CMC) participants on how they select and operate their usernames. The data comprises two answers to an open question in a survey conducted amongst participants of Чat30 (‘Chat30’), a website on the Russian-speaking Internet. These texts are approached as excerpts of communication rather than survey data, and examined using Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) as an analytical tool.
MCA originated from the work of Harvey Sacks, based on Ethnomethodology (EM) developed by Harold Garfinkel who studied interactional character of social reality. MCA serves to analyse linguistic strategies that people use to allocate themselves and others to so-called “membership categories” with commonly recognised sets of attributes ascribed to them. The general perception within this analytical approach is that personal names are used to refer to people, but not to categorise or otherwise characterise them, and therefore are not considered as terms of categorisation. In contrast, the aim of this study is to show that CMC participants handle their usernames as information-rich linguistic tools that share characteristics with them.

This paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a username is operated as an information-rich linguistic tool to ascribe sets of attributes to the named person. The data comprises samples of conversations gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking Internet. As a general analytical framework, I utilize Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodology (EM), which recommends using naturally occurring data and taking on participants' perspective in its interpretation. As methodological tools, I use Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) devised by Harvey Sacks, which I demonstrate constitutes a suitable method to analyse onomastic data.

The Internet represents an abundant source material for linguistic research, which continues to pose new challenges and opportunities on how language is used by its speakers. Its personal naming system, for example, has remained largely unexplored.

Of the many facets of names on the Internet awaiting closer scrutiny, the
phenomenon of usernames is perhaps the most fundamental. This thesis investigates the role they play in online life, the most suitable methods to approach them, and how they compare with the names used offline and where their place is in onomastics in general. With people’s names inevitably connected with one or another aspect of identity, this
work focuses on the relationship between usernames and online identities. The data has been gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking sector of the Internet (RuNet) and comprises all registered usernames (676 at the time of collection) as well as an extensive and methodically selected sample of users’conversations. As a general analytical framework, it utilises Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology,
which conceptualises identity as a result of the ongoing interaction that people negotiate and achieve in everyday life rather than a set of inherent inner qualities. More specifically, the following methodological tools devised by Sacks (e.g. 1995, 1984a, 1984b) have been used to perform the analysis: Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to categorise the usernames of the forum participants, and Conversation Analysis (CA), to observe how usernames contribute to the construction of individual identities. Finally, the concept of Stance, as presented by
Du Bois (2007), has been used as a lens to identify relevant evidence in the conversation samples.

The analysis has demonstrated the need for a systematic categorisation of usernames. The way in which they associate sets of attributes, facilitates the allocation of named entities as members of certain categories of persons. Both linguistic and typographic elements of usernames contribute to how they are perceived and what impression
they create. It is also argued that usernames have an important role to play in the active and ongoing construction of individual identities. The study concludes that CMC participants operate their usernames as meaningful linguistic devices to construct and co-construct each other’s identities. CA and MCD are confirmed to be relevant methods to analyse onomastic data. This study has generated a reliable body of evidence for the assertion that usernames are far from meaningless, and demonstrates, moreover, how their meanings are established. In so
doing, it constitutes an important contribution to onomastic theory with the potential to shed new light on personal naming in general.