What's in a Name?

Abstract: This paper describes experiments on identifying the language of a single name in isolation or in a document written in a different language. A new corpus has been compiled and made available, matching names against languages. This corpus is used in a series of experiments measuring the performance of general LLMs and names-only LLMs on the language identification task. Conclusions are drawn from the comparison between using general LLMs and names-only LLMs and between identifying the language of isolated names and the language of very short document fragments. Future research directions are outlined.