資料として日本の名付けに関する研究に広報誌を用いる可能性について

Abstract

One of the key concerns when conducting onomastic trends research on Japanese is gathering accurate and reliable data. This has proven to be a major problem due to the characteristics of Japanese writing, and there is great demand to develop resources showing both the orthographic forms of names and their phonetic realizations, a major problem given that phonetic data is not normally noted. One resource that has been suggested is municipal newsletters （Satō, 2002; 2007）, which often include data on children born and living in the community. However, there has not been research into how frequent such data is, and this article seeks to fill this gap through a review of 1,020 municipal newsletters. With the results showing that approximately half of the newsletters include such information—translating to at least one-quarter of all Japanese municipalities—it is demonstrated that they are indeed a viable resource of doing onomastics research. With data also often including information on children’s parents’ names and death announcements of older members of the community, the potential to utilize such data to make intergenerational comparisons is also prime. However, smaller municipalities were more likely to include the targeted columns, leading to certain limitations on their representativeness.