Mots. Les langages du politique, n°120/2019

The names of political organizations are proper nouns with specific features: they name groups, they are chosen by those they will collectively name, and their meaningful wording belongs to the common lexicon. A party's baptizing is a language act that confers it its existence as such. A party’s name henceforth fulfils several functions for party members and for the electoral body. It contributes to its positioning, relatively to the collective actors enjoying a similar status, situating it in relation to others that it either shares the political space with, or to others of the same political hue that are situated elsewhere, or elsewhere chronologically, sometimes as forerunnners or as heirs. The party’s name belongs to a universe peopled with other names that it sometimes explicitely echoes. It does neither emerge from a lexical vacuum, nor from a syntactic vacuum. The following eight articles present a wide variety of situations, with fictional, present and past party names, a wide variety of countries, situated on the four main continents, and of political contexts and ideological persuasions. The articles propose comparisons between party names, they describe the evolutions of a party and its name, or they study the emergence of a name… The contributors belong to different disciplines (mostly history, language science and political science), which together contribute to shedding light on that multifaceted object.