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Paper short abstract

Through collaborative autoethnography with birds as colleagues, we explore the relationship between naming and ecocultural identity. Invented names, grounded in language, memory, and culture, reveal how self and more-than-human worlds are co-constituted in moments of attentive encounter.

Paper long abstract

Each assignation of a name to members of the more-than-human world carries cultural, psychological, and emotional perceptions shaped by our ecolinguistic relationships with the living world. How, then, can we explore the cognitive narratives that inform how we name nature?

This collaborative, auto-ethnographic study examines how naming encounters with birds generate econarratives of identity: stories in which self, place, and the more-than-human world are co-constituted. As three scholars of folklore (Ireland), heritage (Australia), and sociolinguistics (England), we independently visit our local areas, pausing whenever a bird appears to ask: What name might we give this being? Which language comes to mind? What physical traits, behaviours, or fleeting moods guide the act of naming?

By treating naming as a narrative practice, we reveal how ecological attention becomes a means of self-inscription. Each moniker carries memories of personal history, linguistic repertoire, and the layered ecocultural contexts of our regions. The emerging econarratives—whether a Gaelic-inspired phrase, an Emilian coinage, or a Greek-Anglicised compound—show how identities are shaped through multispecies relations rather than solely through human communities.

Methodologically, we draw on sensory ethnography, folklore, and language-as-heritage to capture both the immediacy of encounter and the reflective stories that follow. Our comparative analysis highlights how ecologies and linguistic heritages generate distinct modes of belonging.

Ultimately, these bird-naming encounters show that identity can be narrated through ecological intimacy. Econarratives emerge as practices of reciprocity and care, revealing that to name is to locate oneself within a living, more-than-human world while acknowledging the limits of human language.