ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the premises of the cultural turn and its consequences for research unpersuasive and examines the various factors behind cultural modernization with regard to first names. The classification of a newborn as male or female by virtue of their name is in principle an open, socially constructed act; but underlying is the fact that even when parents do not draw from a standard repertoire of names but invent new ones, these are largely structured by gender specific phonemes. The decreasing importance of the two cultural traditions, the German and the Christian, allowed for the incursion of foreign names. The chapter explores how in the twentieth century distinct secularization processes were at work in the area of names: the percentage of Christian names from the Bible and inspired by saints receded over time, and names in general became less "transcendent." German names are the second traditional source from which parents draw.
