Written by Amy Franz

This year, on behalf of Ethnic Technologies, Director of Research & Product Development, Lisa Spira, and Product Design Analyst, Amy Franz, attended the conference in order to promote the E-Tech product as well as network with other professional and academic linguists.

The American Name Society is held in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of America each year in a different US city. This year, it took place in early January in Salt Lake City, Utah.

As self-proclaimed name nerds, Lisa and Amy were happy to present their respective topics in onomastics among fellow onomasticians.

It was Amy’s first time speaking at the conference. She promoted Ethnic Technologies’ predictive gender product, G-Tech. Gender might seem straightforward, but Amy elaborated on how multicultural names can complicate the system.

She addressed multiple different (made-up) examples of names and how their gender differs for individuals of different ethnicities. Amy ended her talk by explaining how G-Tech is a culturally sensitive way to better understand and engage with your marketing audience in a way that completely avoids dependency on personally identifiable information.

Lisa spoke about multicultural names as data, drawing on Ethnic Technologies’ expertise as the leading multicultural marketing data provider. Precisely capturing names yields actionable, inclusive data, and the ability to better connect with multicultural consumers. Together with David Spira, President of Admelora, Lisa explored how his efforts to build a form that captured the names of a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-age audience led him to explore the importance of name data to a large organization.

Lisa and Amy listened to presentations about Swedish names in Kansas, names of the Albanian highlands, and indigenous Mexican name usage in California. This sharing of onomastic insights continues to enhance the E-Tech product suite.

Next year, onomasticians and linguists alike will congregate again at the American Name Society Conference which will be held in New York, New York!