Baby Name Poll Results

I have just the one name, Jessie, and everyone calls me by it. So no, I never experienced this. But I can’t imagine it’s so difficult to have a school name and home name. Most people have dozens of nicknames from different people and manage to keep those straight.

I responded to your earlier poll. I live in Toronto, which is a very multicultural city, so a lot of people have foreign names and I’d say the vast majority have different names for school or work, at the very least an English-sounding nickname from their real name. Like I said, my high school had a lot of Chinese and Korean immigrants and nearly all of them had an English name, mostly because they didn’t think their names would be pronounceable or didn’t like the pronunciation in English.

A word to the wise, a lot of them said that they loved their name in their language, but hated how it sounded in English and would be very annoyed when people tried to be "correct" and say their real name instead of their English name.

Well, I always take comments with a grain of salt. When my first daughter was born I was planning on naming her Deirdre and some people said that I should find a more common, pronounceable name to make life easier for my daughter. When I asked the one lady what she named her daughter, she said Dylan. Talk about making life difficult for the child! By the way, this was over 15 years ago and Dylan for a girl was just the weirdest thing.

Anyway, point is, what one person considers "weird" and difficult is simple to another and vice versa. If you think your child can handle having two names, then do it. if it turns out he can’t, then switch over to using his non-English name.

My grandmother (immigrant to the US) had an ethnic name that was considered too bizarre at the time and the first teacher she had here said "well, we’ll just call you May." And so she’s been May everywhere for the last 75 years! I don’t think her name is all that hard to pronounce, not with some of the names I’ve been seeing recently, but being May certainly made it easier to fit in. I guess she could have started using her real name after she finished school, but May was just so much easier. I don’t know if it helps any, but that’s all I know about the topic. My name is just plain old Anne.

Every experience is different, best approach would be either a name not to difficult to pronounce or one with a suitable nickname for them to go by. Why not post the actual names you like and see opinions on it?

I don’t have two different names but I do have 2 pronunciations of my name. In my professional life, I’m referred to as Tay-jal but at home I go by Tej-ul. My name is spelt Tejal and pronounced Tej-ul but that was apparently too hard for my teachers so I was called Tay-jal and its stuck ever since. It has made my life harder, as a child at school my name was mispronounced and so all of my friends even to this day call me by the mispronounciation. My work colleagues do too as one of them used to be my old teacher. It has been a bit of an issue and it still is a little. Whenever, my personal and professional life interact there is inevitable confusion between the two different pronunciations. Anyway thats just my input. GL!

Here are my thoughts. I have an odd name. When I was little, I wished I had a universal name, like my friend Kristina and her sister Anna, because both of those names work in dozens of languages. I didn’t want only an English name and I didn’t want only an ethnic name. As an adult, though, I realized I love my name in my own language. It’s pretty and it represents who I am. I just hate it in English. I’ve often thought of coming up with a nickname to use at work, but everyone already knows me by my name, so I’ll have to wait until/if I get a new job somewhere.

I suggest either finding a universal name, if there are ones you like. Or if not, pick any name you love in your own language/heritage and find either a nickname in English or a completely different name, maybe starting with the same letter, for him/her to use at school or work.

My siblings and I all have what you would call foreign names. We all except one also have nicknames we used at school. Reyansh became Ray, Ishaan became Shawn, Aadhya became Addie and Navya stayed as is. It’s not hard, really. Most people wouldn’t know how to pronounce our full names anyway.

I think it’s fine. I know someone named Haeyun, and she goes by Haeyun at home and school, but her sister Haejun sometimes uses June/Junie.