Anthroponymic perseverance of Spanish vestigial 〈x〉

Until the early 19th century, the letter 〈x〉 was a common representation of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (Quixote, brúxula). Despite the Royal Spanish Academy’s (RAE) 1815 elimination of 〈x〉 for /x/, it has survived in a number of Mexican indigenous toponyms and their derivatives as well as in a handful of Spanish anthroponymic variants. Drawing on diatopic, diachronic demographic data, this paper traces the retention of vestigial 〈x〉 in six anthroponymic variants: the given name Ximena and the surnames Ximénez/Ximenes, Mexía/s, and Roxas. These forms can be attributed to the often exceptional orthography of proper nouns from a normative perspective. In the case of Ximena, a powerful resurgence of the feature is linked to robust indexicalities of 〈x〉 in Mexican society.