section_path: Naming conventions
section_name: Naming conventions
paragraph_text: Naming conventions
  
  A personal naming system, or anthroponymic system, is a system describing the choice of personal name in a certain society. Personal names consist of one or more parts, such as given name, surname and patronymic. Personal naming systems are studied within the field of anthroponymy.
  
  In contemporary Western societies (except for Iceland, Hungary, and sometimes Flanders, depending on the occasion), the most common naming convention is that a person must have a given name, which is usually gender-specific, followed by the parents' family name. In onomastic terminology, given names of male persons are called andronyms (from Ancient Greek ἀνήρ / man, and ὄνομα / name), while given names of female persons are called gynonyms (from Ancient Greek γυνή / woman, and ὄνομα / name).
  
  Some given names are bespoke, but most are repeated from earlier generations in the same culture. Many are drawn from mythology, some of which span multiple language areas. This has resulted in related names in different languages (e.g. George, Georg, Jorge), which might be translated or might be maintained as immutable proper nouns.
  
  In earlier times, Scandinavian countries followed patronymic naming, with people effectively called "X's son/daughter"; this is now the case only in Iceland and was recently re-introduced as an option in the Faroe Islands. It is legally possible in Finland as people of Icelandic ethnic naming are specifically named in the name law. When people of this name convert to standards of other cultures, the phrase is often condensed into one word, creating last names like Jacobsen (Jacob's Son).
  
  There is a range of personal naming systems:
  
  Different cultures have different conventions for personal names.