What's in a name? As soon as you've figured this out (and it may not be easy), the rest of the problem is fairly simple. For clarity, the example below takes a few steps to do what could be done in a single statement.

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Data::Dumper;
 ;;
 my $rx_name = qr{ \b [[:alpha:]]+ \b }xms;
 ;;
 my $str =
   'iowq john stepy andy anne alic bert stepy anne bert andy step alic
+ andy';
 ;;
 my @names = $str =~ m{ $rx_name }xmsg;
 print Dumper \@names;
 ;;
 my %hash;
 ++$hash{$_} for @names;
 print Dumper \%hash;
"
$VAR1 = [
          'iowq',
          'john',
          'stepy',
          'andy',
          'anne',
          'alic',
          'bert',
          'stepy',
          'anne',
          'bert',
          'andy',
          'step',
          'alic',
          'andy'
        ];

$VAR1 = {
          'john' => 1,
          'stepy' => 2,
          'alic' => 2,
          'bert' => 2,
          'andy' => 3,
          'step' => 1,
          'anne' => 2,
          'iowq' => 1
        };
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