Netherlands Naming Customs: Difference between revisions

*Reliability: Very good.<ref name="profile">The Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Family History Record Profile: The Netherlands,” Word document, private files of the FamilySearch Content Strategy Team, 1987-1998.</ref>

==Given Names==

The history of Dutch given names can roughly be divided in four main periods:

*The domination of '''Germanic names'''. (Migration Period and before until the High Middle Ages)

*The high Middle Ages, when Germanic-based personal names were losing ground to '''non-native holy names'''. (High Middle Ages until the Early Modern era)

*A period of stability, when a very '''strong naming habit emerged'''. (Early Modern era–1960s)

*The Germanic names are the names with the longest history in the Dutch-speaking area; they form the oldest layer of the given names known in Dutch. The Germanic names were characterised by a rich diversity, as there were many possible combinations. A Germanic name is '''composed of two parts, the latter of which also indicates the gender of the person'''. A name like Adelbert or Albert is composed of "adel" (meaning "noble") and "bert" which is derived from "beracht" (meaning "bright" or "shining") hence the name means something in the order of "Bright/Shining through noble behaviour"; the English name "Albright", now only seen as a surname, is a cognate with the same origin.

*Combining these parts was used when the child was named after family or other relatives. For example, the child would receive two parts from different family members, in this way a father named "Hildebrant" and a mother called "Gertrud" would call their son "Gerbrant" and their daughter "Hiltrud".

*Through the course of the Middle Ages names '''derived from Christian Saints''' became more common than Germanic ones. From the 12th century onwards it became custom for the child to receive a Christian name, although some names of Germanic origin like Gertrude and Hubertus remained prevalent as these too became names of Christian saints. In these times typical Dutch names such as "Kees" (Cornelis), "Jan" (Johannes) and "Piet" (Petrus) emerged.

*When the conversion was made from Germanic to Christian names, most parents just picked a name they liked best or would be most helpful in their child's later life, for example if the child would come from a butcher's family and he himself would one day become a butcher, the child would probably be called after "Sint Joris" (the Dutch name for "Saint George"), the patron saint of the butchers.

The Dutch habit of naming newborns after another family member originates with a then-widespread superstition that the name in some way contributed to some form of reincarnation of the person the child was named after, who was usually much older. As the centuries passed, this practice became so standard that the names of the children were practically known at the marriage of the future parents. The rules for naming were the following:

*First-born son is named after paternal grandfather

*When the mother died at the birth of a daughter, the daughter was usually named after the mother.

*Traditionally there was little difference between the Christian name ("doopnaam") and the name used in domestic spheres ("roepnaam"). If someone's Christian name was Johannes, domestically he was referred to as Johan, Jan or Hans.

*After the war, the Dutch became less religious. Thus the Christian name and given name started to diverge, as personal names of foreign origin were adopted. In some cases these names are written more or less phonetically, for example Sjaak (French Jacques, English Jack) and Sjaan (French Jeanne).