Why and where? A name analysis of Polish Facebook groups related to autism

This article examines the naming conventions present in the social media discourse surrounding autism in Poland. The study examined 150 names extracted from Facebook, focusing on their structure and semantic features. It mainly concentrated on motivational elements, evaluative and axiological functions as well as toponymic data represented in the researched social media names. The results show that the categories of support, therapy and treatment, exchange of information et al. are the most frequently profiled motivations behind the creation of groups. With reference to place names, statistical analysis shows that approximately 25% of names include elements indicating geographical location of national or local scale. These findings suggest that not only physical but also digital spaces use names to express identities and denote locations but primarily they constitute markers of social values, needs and motivations prevalent in the autism social-media discourse in Poland.