Deledda's Onomastics: Names and Nicknames from the Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro to the Novels

Abstract

This study investigates Grazia Deledda’s onomastic choices, with particular focus on the naming (names and nicknames) of ‘villains’ and/or antagonists 
and negative characters, tracing the Sardinian writer’s compositional trajectory beginning with her work on Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna (Rome, Forzani e C. Tipografi del Senato 1894). This foundational text documents Deledda’s ethnographic inquiry into Sardinian-Nuorese popular culture, conducted in her early twenties for Angelo De Gubernatis’s journal Rivista delle tradizioni popolari italiane. This work is of particular significance for its onomastic heritage, as it contains a repertoire of ‘Names and Nicknames (Numenes and zistros)’: a list comprising twenty-four masculine names and thirteen feminine names, each accompanied by its Sardinian form, followed by twenty-four ‘nicknames’ (zistros) with Italian translations. This study thus analyzes the literary redeployment of this onomastic repertoire, with specific attention to the names and epithets Deledda assigns to negative characters.