This paper examines social grammars of naming patterns from a sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the names for the Chinese and Italian restaurants located in the Manhattan area of New York City and the state of South Carolina. Logit analysis and t-test were mainly used in this quantitative analysis of naming patterns. The findings of this paper are as follows: (1) whether restaurants are named with ethnic connotation or not are determined more by cultural variables rather than by economic variables, (2) the economic variables are statistically significant but only weakly determine naming patterns, i.e. the marginal effects of the logit analysis is very small, and (3) the only influential economic variable is the reverse attitude toward information use, which implies that the number of computers within a restaurant is directly or indirectly related to the ethnicity of the owner and its naming pattern. Overall, this paper is an attempt to broaden the contents and methodologies of the previous studies on the relationship between brand naming patterns and ethnicity from the sociolinguistic perspective.
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