Real cute story on NPR this morning (part of the StoryCorps series) about a man named Ramon Sanchez who recalls how, during the 1950s while he was growing up, all the teachers tried to anglicize his name to Raymond. This got me thinking about all the poor Hardicks and Shitangs and Ashfaqs out there and the struggles they must have faced growing up. Even the Poojas probably had a tough time. Anyways, the punchline of the story is TOTALLY worth it so take a listen.
Since kindergarten he’d been known as Ramon. “Rrrrrramon,” he says with a thick roll of the R.
But when he got to the second grade, his name was Americanized. “Everyone was calling me Raymond.”
“On the playground, in the classroom. Raymond! Hey, Raymond! Hey, Raymond!” he says.
And it wasn’t just his name that got changed.
“If there was a girl named Maria, her name became Mary. Juanita became Jane,” he says. [Link]
They used to call me Ray Ray or Ragu in high school (even better, they called me Rahulk).
What about the counterpoint? South Asians parents in this country who chose Anglo names for their non-Christian offspring because “it will be good for business”. It’s common among Chinese and Korean immigrants, but we’ve resisted in large measure.
I kinda liked the Newsweek cover from the March that was titled “When Barry became Barack”.
Monty
2 · id888 said
How pervasive is this among South Asians? I have yet to encounter a non-Christian Desi with a given Anglo name. There have been quite a few with Anglicized knicknames, though.
heh, people always tried to anglicize my name too, but i always resisted it even though i thought i had an ugly name!
imagine my trauma – i was given a muslim “good” name but my home name is anglo (for no good reason besides that it rhymed with my sister’s bengali good name). in school, when i was taunted for my foreign name my 6 year old brought in my anglo home name to avoid the teasing (and because it was more familiar to me). 15 years later, i began to reclaim my good name but a lot of the damage has already been done!
(i think i shouldve posted that in a “Namesake” thread…)
I haven’t heard the NPR story – but this particular example is not so much about name changing – as changing the spelling. Spanish, English, French cultures have some common names, which are spelt differently, partly because they are in fact pronounced differently, though they are essentially the same name. So Ramon/Raymond/Ramond/ = Spanish/English/French. Also: Juan/John/Jean etc. — so no big deal, even lame, but since it is about spelling, that would be the other thread 🙂
This is nowhere comparable to getting yourself a new name (like Piyush — Bobby). However, it does illustrate the profound steamrollering hegemonic homogenization that characterizes aspects of American culture. 🙂
Many Desi parents in the US will give their kids names like Anjali (to sound like Angie or Angelina), Megha, “Anita” or “Nikki” (short for Nikita) or Priyanka (a very popular Desi name these days and rhymes with “Bianca”), Sue (short for Sushma etc) or Neil (for the boys) or Ryan (short for Narayan). Those Sanskrit names and others are easily Anglicized. The Desi parents (that I know) feel it will be easier for non Desis to pronounce and easy to remember. Now those are all beautiful names but I think they are being over used and not as unique anymore. I totally respect that adorable Sanjaya Malakar for keeping his full name! Same thing for his sister Shyamala – and that’s a name which would be considered even more difficult for the average non Desi American to pronounce. Of course, it is a free world and you can give your kid or yourself any name you want but a little creativity is good.
All desi born in 2009 be named Bobby after the new vice president
one of my faiba’s name is Lilavati, uncle calls her, Lil.
We named our daughter Saachi but it is still butchered_ “sasha,sashi,eveny saykee’. But 90 percent of the ppl get it and pronounce it perfectly. We picked the name however, not for its pronounceability but because my wife had always wanted this name for our daughter. Its not a common Sikh name, so we initially got some quizzical looks from other family members….
OK, must also put in a good word for the hegemonic homogenization. Out in Old Europe, in regions on the boundaries between Cyrillic and Roman script hegemony – even funnier things happened. The Polish alphabet, for example, largely uses the Roman script, but with additional diacritical symbols and a noticeably different enunciation convention, and a much lighter vowel-density.
Would you really rather someone tried to spell himself ‘Andrzej’ when the name is pronounced ‘Andrei’, or would you rather he gave up the ghost and became ‘Andrew’, or at least spell it within the accepted transliteration conventions,as ‘Andray’ ? And this is the easiest example I can think of.
The Chinese, to take another example, created more problems with their ‘X’s and ‘Z’s than even the Poles. ‘Xang’ is better than ‘Chang’? Really? For whom?
I had a friend with the last name ‘Xing’ – and people would simply read it as ‘Crossing’. Time after time.
So some hegemonic homogenization may not be bad after all.:)
I purposefully go by a shortened name because I myself got sick and tired of teaches and classmates mispronouncing it, and I still get a little bit irritated by people mispronouncing it.
Non-desis see “Nikhil” and say “Nukheeeel”, “Mikhail”, “Neekhile”, “Nickel” (Nickel!? C’mon!)
So the policy is “Nikhil” around Desis, and “Nick” around non-Desis.
I appreciate immigrant parents who carefully consider implications and spellings when naming their American-born child. The problem is that most desi parents don’t seem to realize that the transliterations of their names into English, with weird spellings that don’t reflect how NATIVE English speakers pronounce words (especially vowels), will lead to problems. My name, Kedar, is fine in India where everyone in the interest of standardization recognizes “e” as the dipthong “ay” (as in “bay” or “say”). But in the US, Canada and England, the letter “e” is usually NOT a dipthong, and everyone calls me “Kee-dar” or “Keh-dar” or “Kuh-dar”.
A better spelling for my name, in terms of how native English speakers pronounce letters (especially vowels) would be: “Kay-dar” or even “Quedar” (which means “to stay or remain” in Spanish).
In the end, I was mocked mercilessly in school. Kedar Radar Darth Vader, they used to call me. Oh, the horror.
One of my distant cousins who recently immigrated named his kid “Archit,” which is either a short form of ‘architect’ or a horribly easy opening for kids to call him “Are-shit.” Oh, how could my cousin be so dumb?
On that subject, this is actually a name. And, it’s not pronounced ‘Skitter’.
‘Archit’ is actually pronounced closer to the sound of ‘Urchin’ – means ‘chosen’ or ‘selected’ or ‘prayed for’ – not giving anybody ideas on what to call him!
hardik, anyone?
i do see the benefit of changing names, esp. when the existing names are so hard to pronounce in your daily environment. my dad moved to kansas from india in the early 1960s, so he became jack. and it’s interesting because now that name change has gone all the way from the states back to india – even the cousins he grew up with, all his nieces/ nephews etc. call him only by his english name. my mother also uses variations on her indian name. but oddly (hypocritically?) they get a bit upset when they see their or others’ kids doing the same.
on the other hand, pronunciation (and spelling) has def. been a consideration for all my friends who have chosen baby names recently. of course, it limits the options, but it’s still a nice compromise.
The punchline in this one is really quite good. My dad’s name is Bharat, and initially, he allowed his coworkers to mispronounce it without complaint, until his name morphed into Brad. Similarly, I have a cousin Ravi who let people mangle the pronunciation of his name until they started calling him Robbie. I like that, in both cases, these were turning points for them to actually correct everyone and force them to actually say their names properly.
On a different note, it’s really nice when StoryCorps gets a bit more diverse- I love the series, but I’ve complained before that it doesn’t capture all the ‘faces’ of America, so it’s nice to see more of that incorporated.
4 · delurker said
(raises hand) Non-Christian Desi with an anglo name. Most of my cousins have anglo names as well, although our middle names are very south asian. It has gotten quite ridiculous now though – i have nephews named christian and nicolai…….nicolai??? really??? Having had the experience i think my kid (gasp) would have a South Asian name.
15 · chachaji said
We are all Schitters.
Still somewhat irritated and mostly amused by the person who a few days ago insisted on calling me Marjorie after I taught her how to read the name she carried on her clipboard. More interesting when you consider that she and I live in a different, culturally-complex city with street names like Tchoupitoulas and Melpomene and women named Clotilde and Aquanette.
So to make things easier for cust. service reps who never seem to spell my name right(Bhavana)..I started spelling out my name as “Havana with a ‘B’ in the front.” So much to my chagrin, they started calling me Bee-Havana! Ranting to my friends about this wasn’t such a bright idea. So now everyone calls me ‘BeeHavaana’. sigh
Mytri==My3 heh heh heh
atleast his name is not anal patel…or anus ibrahim
My third grade teacher tried to anglicize my name. I said he couldnt. He said hed call me “bob”. I responded with “if you call me bob, ill call you *sshole”. he sent me to the principals office. My dad has to come in. My dad called the teacher *sshole. and said, if u cant pronounce my sons name, we cant pronounce your name.
chachaji’s point is important. mikhail to michael or daoud to david is qualitatively different from anil to neil. additionally, one reason that chinese take “western” names is that there is just no way that non-chinese speakers can pronounce their names. not only that, sometimes the way that westerners pronounce their names in terms of the tones make them sound like words beside their name (e.g., how’d you like to have your name mispronounced as “bath-tub” or something?).
p.s. i put “western” in quotes because these names have diverse origins. some are semitic (david, michael), some greco-roman (julia, alexander) and some are northern european of various roots (e.g., eric, william). additionally, there is always a new crop of names with no antecedants which become really popular for a bit.
also, check out popular baby names http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
interesting how much more prevalent hebrew origin names are for boys in the top 10, sure it’s a coincidence.
6 · ensure said
Interesting. So hte bhalonaam and daaknaam is a Bengali thing? But then daaknaams as a rule, even when they make sense, are sort of Anglo isn’t it? Imagine the plight of the middle-aged man whose mom insists on calling him PomPom in front of his children!
This careful pronounicng of the name isn’t simply an America thing. In my college Sanskrit class our professor Parambil Francis Davies inisted on sanskritising our friend Ashfaaq to – Ashvak!
Really most south asian names are pretty easy to pronounce. Most are pronounced as they are spelled – most south asian languages being phonetic and all.
I really, really dont understand why it is so hard for a non-desi to pronounce simple names. Why each and every name has to brutally butchered.
I am 8 months pregnant and am seriously thinking what to name the child – something that is indian, that is not too indian but is not completely non-desi.
I think its a difficult balancing act. But what also irks me is that I have to take into account all aspects in naming my child and even if I do, some idiot will come along and butcher it no matter what. Go figure!
I have a Sri Lankan name (another variant is more common, but mine isn’t unusual) that converts perfectly to an American name if you stress the syllables differently. Anglicized spelling is the same too.
So I’m in the unusual position of facing skepticism when people ask me for my “real” name. blargh.
Anyway, the toughest name to bear, I think, is Sheetal. People always seem to pronounce it “shit-all”.
Thankfully I don’t have any experience with people trying to, well, ‘Dutchify’ my name. Unfortunately, the Anglo spelling of Indian names means that people whose native language is not English will pronounce those names in their own tongue. So ‘Meena’ becomes ‘Mayna’ and ‘Meenakshi’, well, impossible! Luckily most people take the trouble to pronounce my name properly in it’s original form, including teachers. In fact, the only person who insisted on calling me ‘Meena’, saying as an excuse that she couldn’t pronounce my full name, was a British lady! I usually go by ‘Meena’ because that’s what my parents call me, and it’s easier to remember for the Dutch. Unfortunately most of the time(except with my close friends) I’m still ‘Mayna’!
This isn’t a problem exclusive to Indian names though – Chinese names get the same treatment. Unlike in the States, the Chinese here are much more traditional and they stick to original Chinese names instead of attempting to give their children Dutch names. There’s the hypothetical ‘Vijay Bajaj’, an inside joke among my parents and their friends, whose name gets the ‘J’ treatment – all the ‘J’s are made to sound like ‘Y’s! And of course there’s the guttural ‘G’ and ‘R’ – my Italian highschool classmate Gaia had to correct teachers time and time again because they mangled her name into something unrecognisable!
Just to add to my post, I’m shocked that so many Americans have so much difficulty pronouncing the simple, largely phonetic Indian names. I always thought that the Anglo spelling was the biggest hurdle to overcome, but that shouldn’t be a problem in the states no?
Hey… it isnt just a desi issue. Think of all the Ho’s and the Fuchs out there. My personal desi favorite is Nishit. But I’ve even known some desis torment a person named iqbal for his solitary hair.
I can’t speak for all, but my sister in law who’s Hong Kong Chinese said that her English teachers at school made her class give themselves English names. For a while she was Carol and then later she changed her name to Sophia (even though her given name is very easily pronounceable). Some of her friends keep changing their English names whenever they change jobs …
A friend once kept calling me “sonar” as that’s what his spell check kept changing it to …
No one tried to give me an Amercanized name in school, even though no one could ever pronounce it (I’m a Sandhya) Most non-Desi people pronounce it San-dee-ya, which also means watermelon in Spanish, so I got called watermelon by the Latino kids a lot. Ironically, my family has called me Sandy since I was born, hardly any of them call me by my full name
Nishit Dikshit.
My father-in-law, Ravi, was apparently asked at work if he’d mind being called Robbie. His response was “no, as long as you don’t mind if I call you Bhupinder”. That one cracked me up.
I find that just about every 2nd Indian boy in the last 10 years has been named Rohan, presumably because its assumed it is easy to pronounce. My son has a cousin and 2 friends at his school with that name, and I know at least 3 other recent Rohans among our family friends. The irony is that at school they are called everything from “Rohin” to “Rohaan”. In fact, we use the different pronunciations ourselves when talking about them just to make it easier to differentiate them.
My name is Bhasker. I found out waaaay back when I was at University of Cincinnati in sixties that Americans cannot pronounce BH correctly. They would called me bahasker or basker or such silly name. Part of the problem is there is not one word in English dictionary that starts with Bh. There was hound of Baskerville, but not Bhaskerville. My dad always called me by my nickname “Bako”. So I stopped these yankees butchering my name any further and adopted “Bob” only in verbal conversation. To this day, I am known as Bob except of course among Desis. I still get mails addressed to me as Bob Tripathi. You know what? Americans are lazy. They don’t even seriously try to learn and pronounce foreign name correctly. It’s the ugly American attitude I guess !! My sympathy to Brimful@ 17.
Perhaps it’s time to lighten up. How many Syriac Christian Malayalis do you know — don’t you know, more like — in India who were hassled for their funny names growing up in North India and chose “Indian”-sounding pseudonyms to avoid getting beaten up on Bombay playgrounds? Surely it’s the same for Muslims….
YoDad writes: >>Part of the problem is there is not one word in English dictionary that starts with Bh
It’s more than that – there is no non-Indian language in the world that has any word starting with “Bh”. Go ahead – check your white pages. The only names that start with “Bh” are Indian names (and Pakistani derivates of Indian names like Bhutto etc).
Bh is unique only to, you know, Bharat.
M. Nam
I received this in my email today! Taking about giving yourself an Anglicized name!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvtWAXoZjTc
Keeping in theme (and because it’s Friday) – courtesy of the good folks from Goodness Gracious Me …
Your medicine is worse than the disease: first, you cannot tell whether people like men or women if your kaydar is switched off. Second, all Quedars are on the no-fly list.
What about saying that “Kedar” rhymes with “Seder”?
My name is a relatively rare old sankrit word. In principle, not hard to pronounce.. however its not spelt in an exactly phonetic way. i have groups of mutually exclusive friends who say my name in slightly different friends. then, when they meet each other they feel vaguely guilty that they’ve been mispronouncing my name for years.. hehe
Oh please I don’t know too many people who HAVE given their kids a desi name. I’ve lost track of the number of Ethans and Dylans and Ryans. WTH. This is a huge peeve with me. I’ve questioned my close friends and the answer I got was “Oh it will make their life easier, they won’t get judged, they won’t have problems on applications.” Really? What about the last name then? What are you going to do with the Patel or Mehta or Shah or Joshi? And they seemed to do just fine and get ahead successfully in life so what’s the deal with giving their kid crutches? Look I’m fine if someone tells me “F you I’m naming my kid whatever I want” but I can’t help but judge them. That’s just me.
Americans can be lazy. They butcher my freaking name Rupaul, Aruba, Rubal, Rappa, Ruth (freaking ET on the Universal Studios tour called me Ruth) when I clearly wrote and said R U P A when I entered. I’ll correct you 3 times after that you are up shit creek. Either I will ignore you or I’ll go apeshit on you. My husband and his brother don’t have shortened versions of their long ass very desi names and their parents used to tell them that if someone butchered their name or changed it or teased them about it punch em hehehee. Every single one of their non Indian friends says their respective names right. That’s what I’m going to teach my kids. Someone try to change your names to something else you better let them know that’s not ok.
Many IBDs(the really fresh kind) screw up western names too.
We have a IBD at work who calls
Graham (pronounced Gra-am) as Gra-haam. Charles (pronounced CHAR-ulls) as Char-less Zane as JAne Yvonne as Vy-won
Its sometime tough even among desis. In college my roommates was this 5′ 2” guy named ParikShit. The starting letter of poor guys name was permanently changed from “P” to “B” !
I think it’s true that there has been a lot of laziness in the past with corresponding pressure to change names but I do think that there is much more openness in North America these days towards non-Anglo/Anglicized names. At the very least, there seems to be more of a trend these days to view such names as exotic rather than straight up weird (leaving aside some of the more unfortunate sounding homonyms). But a number of the 2nd gens with kids do seem scarred enough by their childhood experiences to try to want to avoid that fate for their offspring (some who will, no doubt, will bitterly rail against their “stupid and boring and now I won’t be able to get a job in India” names once they hit puberty)–plus it’s way easier to buy personalized souvenir licence plates for the kids’ rooms.
I also agree that the laziness is a human trait — wherever there is enough of a mainstream sound, you’ll see resistance/inability to incorporate foreign phonemes.
For myself, these days, I figure if the North American in question is willing to give “Siobhan” or “Sinead” a pass (which they almost always are), then they can damn well take the time to broaden their horizons regarding other less Anglo names.
It reflects on the culture you grow up with i suppose. In a city where one would bump into a casimir, a hongsook, a kulsoom, a moredechai around the next corner… a khoofia isnt such a big deal. 🙂
In the grown up world, the ability of Americans to say your name correctly is directly proportional to your net-worth. Not too many Americans complain about Japanese names. The fact that so many Chinese have an alternate name conveys low self-esteem.
I find it quite irritating too when people in the US mispronounce my (real) name, and it’s quite an easy one too. Having said that, we Indians do it to each other all the time. Northies cannot pronounce some of the longer Southie names; I am not sure if the reverse occurs because Northies usually have easier names.
Then there is the issue of accents and dialects. My mother called our maid “Chanda” for a long time. Turned out, the maid was really saying her name was “Shondha” which was “Sandhya” in a thick Bengali accent.
Yo Dad, you and my dad would have a lot of war stories to exchange! 😉
In defense of some Americans, I have had some Caucasian friends express sincere wounded feelings that I didn’t teach them to say my name properly. They didn’t know until other desi friends said my name properly in their presence, and then they felt foolish for having mispronounced it for so long.
It’s really a tightrope– on the one hand, I am not ashamed of my name and have no desire to anglicize it. On the other hand, I don’t feel like saying my name 10 times to get someone to say it properly. So if they come close on the 2nd attempt, I usually let it go at that.