The foaf:name of something is a simple textual string.

XML language tagging may be used to indicate the language of the name. For example:

FOAF provides some other naming constructs. While foaf:name does not explicitly represent name substructure (family vs given etc.) it does provide a basic level of interoperability. See the issue tracker for status of work on this issue.

The foaf:name property, like all RDF properties with a range of rdfs:Literal, may be used with XMLLiteral datatyped values. This usage is, however, not yet widely adopted. Feedback on this aspect of the FOAF design is particularly welcomed.