Interaction of ecological and cultural salience in English folk-naming of British birds

At the heart of the interplay between names and knowledge is the relative salience of different taxa. Hunn (1999) described four, semi-overlapping, kinds of salience: phenotypic, perceptual, cultural and ecological. Whilst the first three are well documented, Ecological Salience remains largely hypothetical in the literature. In this paper I test Hunn’s concept of Ecological Salience by reference to recorded English folk-names of British birds. Using original bird census data, I demonstrate an overall correlation between the number of names, and/or the number of monolexic names, of a species with up to three measures of specific ubiquity, but that this relationship is significantly weaker for those taxa with documented significance to C19^th English Folk culture, which tend to carry more names than predicted by ecological ubiquity alone. The study suggests that Ecological Salience has been significant in bird naming, but that its effect was masked for culturally salient taxa.