The aim of this paper is to take stock of, and briefly introduce, the various types of change that
family names (that are essentially lexical items, proper names in particular, that can be inherited) may
undergo in the Hungarian linguistic and cultural context. The paper proposes that earlier frameworks
of typological description should be expanded: first, certain types of change should be added; and
second, artificial changes of names should be included alongside natural ones. The types of change
to be described are as follows: 1. complex changes (the emergence and disappearance of certain
names); 2. entire changes (abandoning an old name and assuming a new one); 3. partial and regular
structural changes (those of syntactic or morphological structure); 4. partial and irregular structural
changes (formal vs. semantic ones). In addition, further – albeit different – types of change are also
worth considering: 5. partial formal changes (in writing or in speech only); 6. other, special, non-
formal changes (of the semantic structure and/or pragmatic status of a proper noun). This typology
of changes is necessarily language specific in some respects; but in other respects, especially in its
major directions, it can draw the reader’s attention to more general types and tendencies of change
