Sverige har fått sin första kvinnliga statsminister! Självklart firar vi det genom att titta närmare på hennes efternamn – Andersson.

The aim of this thesis is to describe surname patterns and changes of surname among the Sami of Sweden. It presents the results of three studies. The first is a survey of the present-day stock of surnames (family names) among the Sami community, based on the 2005 electoral register for the Swedish Sami Parliament. It investigates the proportions of names deriving from different languages, and the commonest names in each group. The same study was carried out for different areas, showing that the northernmost parts of Sweden have a Sami name stock significantly different from that of the majority population. Further south, the stock of names is less marked, but no area is without Sami elements.

The second study, based on archival material, concerns changes of name by Swedish Sami to newly formed surnames, over the period 1920–2004. It examines not only the names adopted, but also the ones replaced; how the name stock has been affected by different patterns of name change; and, as far as possible, who the name changers were. The study shows that, for a long time, names derived from Sami and Finnish were replaced with names formed from Swedish. This may be largely because of the stigma once attached to Sami ethnicity. More recently, Sami-language names seem to have been retained to a greater extent, possibly owing to the improved status of the culture.

The third study looks at name changes in favour of names marked as Sami in character. The data consist in part of archive materials, but above all of interviews with three Sami informants who have themselves adopted Sami-language surnames. This study presents the informants’ thoughts on ethnicity and changes of name.

In addition to the author’s own studies, the thesis includes a review of earlier research on Sami surnames, hereditary and non-hereditary, and a list of individual surnames with literature references regarding their origins and meanings. In the thesis, name changes are studied as a single, overall process, with an emphasis on the role of names in society, in particular as ethnic markers.

This paper presents a quantitative study of the registration of diacritics in Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese and Turkish family names in the official Swedish population records. Out of the examined diacritics, vowels with accents and the Turkish letter <ç> are registered in up to 21 % of the cases, whereas the Turkish letter <ü> is registered in over 90 % of the occurrences. The author discusses possible explanations for this pattern. Parts of a bigger interview study is also presented, where informants share their views of diacritics in the Swedish population records.

Bidén, Sortin and Prunell are not Swedish surnames, but judging from their structure one could imagine that they were. They closely match the pattern of three common Swedish surname types, represented by names such as Lundén, Lundin and Lundell. Surnames of this kind are not among the most common in Sweden, but the endings in question occur in a large number of different names. As the opening examples perhaps show, to many Swedish speakers words containing them are strongly suggestive of surnames. This article explores Swedish surnames ending in -én, -in and -ell, above all to see whether there are any differences in their geographical distribution in modern-day Sweden. Each ending is studied individually, for each of the 21 counties in the country, and the geographical distribution of some of the individual names is also touched on.

This article presents a study of surnames that have become established in Sweden by immigration, in this case immigration from 1920 onwards. A very brief account is given of the history of immigration to the country, followed by a description of the method used in the study, which involved classifying surnames not recorded in Sweden on 1 January 1920, but with at least 100 bearers registered as residing there on 31 December 2010, by their languages of origin. The ten most frequent names are presented, along with some of the most important donor languages. Finally, the author outlines plans for further studies of how immigrant names are adapted in speech and writing to use in Swedish society, with a particular focus on the occurrence of parallel pronunciation forms and the use of diacritics.

This article deals with Finnish-language surnames (family names) in Sweden. These may be borne by Finnish immigrants or their descendants, or by members or descendants of the Tornedalian minority group in the north of Sweden. In this study, the 20 commonest Finnish-language surnames in Sweden as a whole, the 20 commonest Finnish-language surnames in Norrbotten county in the northernmost of Sweden, and the 20 commonest surnames in Finland are compared. This shows that the top-20 surnames of Norrbotten county and of Finland differ to quite a large extent. While the commonest surnames in Finland often ends in the suffix –nen, a suffix that was widespread in Finland during the times of nation-building in the last decades of the 1900th century, the commonest Finnish-language surnames in Norrbotten county are usually simplex names. A study of the 1880, 1890, 1900 and 1910 Swedish censuses shows that the Finnish-language surnames common in Norrbotten county is also those of long history in Sweden. It is concluded that the Finnish-language surnames in Sweden consists of two layers, the Tornedalian minority surnames and the Finnish immigrant surnames, even though some surnames belong to both those groups.

This article explores the differences between the contemporary stocks of forenames in Sweden and Norway. Taking as its starting point the two countries’ 100 commonest male and female names in 2012, it lists names that are among the top 100 in one country, but have a frequency of less than 0.5 per thousand in the other. Names with a frequency below 0.1 per thousand are examined more closely and compared. In addition, a study is made of the 40 most popular names for each gender, for children born in Sweden and Norway in 2012. A comparison between these names and the names common in the population as a whole suggests that the Norwegian stock of forenames could in future move closer to that of Sweden, which is generally less distinctive. Finally, conceivable reasons for the differences between the countries’ namestocks are discussed, along with the possible significance of etymology when parents choose names for their children.