A Goodreads user asked Ann Leckie:

I wonder if you could write a little about your linguistic influences in the Ancillary series world? The way things and individuals are named and the differences between naming conventions in different areas speaks a lot to the idea of colonization and decolonization, and it would be interesting to know more about how you approach those things. Thank you for such smart and beautifully crafted books.

Ann Leckie Thanks for your kind words! I'm glad you like the books!

So, I have very little formal linguistic training, but I do take that aspect of my work seriously.

To some extent, I think of something cool (a particular name, or group of names, or whatever) and then build things around it. Sometimes I'll look for parallel things in the real world--how do things get named? Who decides on those names? How do names and naming differ in different places and times and what happens when one idea about naming gets brought into a place where another idea has been dominant for a while? And sometimes the concept comes first--I was intrigued when I first ran across the idea of theophoric names, for instance. It seemed odd and foreign, but of course after a bit I realized that quite a lot of the people around me have theophoric names, it's just we don't recognize them as such, mostly because we don't think of what our names mean, in the dictionary/translation sense, but partly because even when we do they're so very ordinary and we don't translate the "je" and "el" parts of those names as Yaweh or El, but as "God." Which I think is in a weird space where it seems like a name and not a name at the same time.

That's a roundabout way of saying that there are several theophoric names in the Ancillary books, though I generally don't mark them as such. It's a bit of worldbuilding that's mostly only visible to me. (Though close attention to one detail in Sword, and a couple others in Mercy, makes it clear that Seivarden is one of those names.)

I've been interested for quite some time in the way "first" names are chosen in the US. In some ways you can tell things about people by the names they have (or give their kids) but sometimes it's not what you'd assume right off the bat. Choices of name can express affiliation with religious ideas or particular ethnicities, or might just be what your parents thought sounded cool, or who your parents admired at the time you were born, or any number of things. You can't reliably say "Anyone with an Irish-derived first name must come from a family with Irish ancestors," for instance, but such a name might actually indicate that. And then of course there's the way name choices are class-based (and the way some of the open contempt for "funny" or "ridiculous" names is as much about sneering at the lower class as it is about laughter at the ridiculous).

Yeah, names in particular have fascinated me for quite a long time.

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