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The Origin of Boge
Meaning
Helpfully Boge is an unusual surname, so trawling through birth, death and marriage records, newspaper articles, church records, town histories, genealogy databases and ships passenger lists to find lost ancestors is a little easier than the poor Smith's and Jones's. Though where did it come from and what does it mean?To answer the question we have to go back to where the Boge's came from, Germany, and have a rummage through the old records for a start. The spelling of surnames was fairly arbitrary back in the day and were often written down how they were heard by an official. Boge, for example, is listed variously in early German records as Böe, Bögge, Boyen, Böjen, Buoys, Böye, Böje, Böie, Boege and Böge. During the 19th Century however, the spelling of Böge (note the umlauts over the o) gradually becomes the norm and the name is not uncommon in the Holstein region of northern Germany today. Us Australians Anglicised the name, gradually dropping the umlauts, as they weren't commonly used in English. So we know that surnames can change.According to the Dictionary of American Family Names (published by Oxford University Press), which at least provides some authoritive guidance, Boge is Frisian and a varient of Böe. This fits with research of ealry Boge's in Germany. For example, the cottager Dierk Böe, aged 40, was buried on 4 October 1800 in Kaltenkirchen [Church Register Kaltenkirchen, Deaths, No. 70] and he is also listed on a 1770 map of landowners as Diercks Boye. So we might be on to something.
Relevant dictionary entries
Frisia or Friesland is an old region straddling the modern Dutch and north German border. It has been divided since 1815 into Friesland, a province of the Netherlands, and the Ostfriesland and Nordfriesland regions of northwestern Germany. It's the traditional homeland of the Frisians, a Germanic people who speak a language closely related to English, and is probably most famous for it's cows - Holstein Friesians (shortened to Holsteins in North America, and Friesians in the UK) the world's highest-production dairy animals. Back to the dictionary, and the entry then for Boe states that the name is of Frisian origin from the personal name Boye. According to Ostfriesische Vornamen von Aafke bis Zwaantje (Manno Peters Tammena, 2007), this name is possibly a younger form of the Old Frisian name Bôio meaning 'dweller' from the Old Saxon bûan and Old Frisian bōgia meaning 'to live, to dwell'. So, after all that, it seems that Boge is of Frisian origin and probably means a 'dweller' - not the most exciting name meaning!Pronunciation
Unfortunately researching the pronunciation of the name is a bit more tricky. So this is a theory based on snippits of unsourced info, gut feel, a hint of logic and as much research as an English speaker can do into the pronunciation of an obscure German surname.
The possible origin and early variations of the name provide a hint at why Boge is pronounced (by those of us in Australia) with a ‘soft G’ (almost a J sound) rather than ‘hard G’. In the dominant Mooring dialect of the Frisian language, G is pronounced as a W, or a J, or is dropped between vowels. The pronunciation in the old Low German (Plattdeutsch) language of Northern Germany is also instructive. When a G is within a word or at the end of it, it is pronounced as a kind of mild 'sh' (after e, i, ä, ö and ü). These pronunciations would account for many of the historical spelling variants as well as the ‘soft G’ pronunciation.
The pronunciation in modern Germany however is different. The current modern pronunciation in Holstein is with a ‘hard G’ - close to B-OER-GEH. So why the difference? It’s possible that the name has changed pronunciation in Germany (from when the Boge’s left in 1866) to a hard G to reflect the introduction and spread of Standardised German (which originated in the south of the country) to the north of the country where Plattdeutsch was previously prominent. Thus the Australian Boge’s retained the original pronunciation while the German Boge’s updated theirs to fit with Standardised German.
Map showing Frisian areas
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