The government ate my name
slate.com153 points by notok 4 days ago
153 points by notok 4 days ago
There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.)
So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality, or change one partner's last name to match the other's.
But that second option has problems too, because that name change doesn't retroactively apply in Russia - so now you might have American documents that say you're a Elena Kuznetsov, but your Russian documents say that you're Elena Kuznetsova - so any legal dealings that involve the two countries (like, say, traveling) become significantly more complicated because you need to prove that the two names actually point to the same person.
At least middle names aren't a big issue - patronymics mean something in Russia, but here in America it's just a string you pop into the "middle name" field, and maybe you get asked what it means, and get to teach someone what patronymic means.
> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality
Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encounter any actual issues with this.
Sometimes people will assume we aren't married and/or divorced, and people will often call me by my wife's last name and vice versa, but it has never caused any actual problem. Never had any system that assumes we have the same last name. So many people live in blended families anyway, that very few systems/people make these assumptions any more.
Looking at it from the other way, your mom probably didn't change her name because it's not a big deal where you live ?
People getting the issues live in different systems and/or have different needs, and it also changes with our world getting more digital. One part that doesn't much depend on locality this days would be international travel and money.
For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them (proving you're a parent not being enough). Depending on how it goes your plane could be gone by that time.
Money is the same, there;s a lot less check if you send to yourself or family than to a random stranger. Having a different name can mean your transfer getting stuck for days of back and forth.
Then again, if you're just staying in your town never dealing with anything outside of it, you might never have to think about your name in your whole life.
My mom got married in the 70s in the US. It wasn't a huge issue, but people did think she was strange.
I never experienced any of what you say as a child. We travelled internationally a number of times, never had anyone tell us she wasn't my mom or anything.
I am not sure what you mean about the money thing. My mom was on my accounts when I was a kid (with different last names) so she could send me money. As an adult, I can't see how sending money would be an issue. My mom and I transfer money to each other fairly often still ($70k recently, went through fine).
I did not stay in my home town. Not sure how they would be relevant.
Again, most people would assume (if they assumed anything) that my parents were divorced, which is incredibly common. Half my friends had different last names from their siblings and/or parent. Blended families are incredibly common.
I am now a dad of two. They have my last name, while my wife (their mom) has a different name. Again, never a problem at doctors or school or anything. They always make you fill out your full name and relationship. Again, super common to have different last names here im California.
This happened to my grandparents a few times going back and forth to Canada with me when I was a kid (before 9/11). Even with the birth certificate and whatever else, they can arbitrarily decide to waste your entire day. Better safe than sorry.
I think part of it was because the hospital I was born at was renamed just before I was born, and then demolished not too long after. I've had it trip things up before remembering to mention the original hospital name. Everyone seems generally familiar with the bullshit now, just a matter of remembering to bring it up because they're expecting it.
I can’t fathom this being an issue in 2025 where you can have digitized versions of your kid’s birth certificate on your phone, which indicate that you are their parent.
The kidnapping thing has nothing to do with names, if you only have one parent every country has their rules and you should check them out ahead of time.
We did it with every kid/parent and name combination. The only time we where ever asked to show papers was when the names didn't match. It shouldn't be that way, but IME it's a factor.
As you point out, being the parent doesn't really matter in that case, it needs to be proven that both parent agree on the kid leaving the country.
> For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them
Passports have your parents name, this might cause the clerk to do a double check to make sure but unless losing you or your children documents you will never run into this. Or if you are travelling without passports (which is okay between some countries) and using documents (like birth certificates) in different languages
My wife doesn’t share my name or the name of our kids. We travel a lot. This has literally never been an issue ever, anywhere.
I mean the comment they replied to specifically mentioned moving to America. I cannot fathom this being an actual issue in the USA.
To your point(and parent's), it won't be if you're never getting out of the USA nor deal with the rest of the world.
But most people moving in don't cut all ties with their home country nor never touch their passport again I think.
We travelled internationally as a family when I was a kid. No one ever mentioned our names being different.
Again, a huge percentage of the population has divorced parents, plus all the kids born out of wedlock. That is like half the population that already don’t have the same last name as at least one of their parents. Everyone who deals with the population is going to encounter this situation every day. They aren’t going to be surprised or confused by a kid with a different name as their parent.
Did you ever travel internationally along with only one of your parents? I know of many cases around the world where authorities will definitely cause you some trouble if you try to do that, even more if somehow "expected" naming conventions don't match up. At least that's how it's been in the last 2 decades.
I travel multiple times a year internationally with my toddler. She has a different last name than me. No issues whatsoever. Yes, i bring a birth cert and a letter from her mother that we can travel, but no one has ever asked for these.
I have heard that others have had problems with picking up children from school and with visiting their partners in the hospital. The one and only time my wife has had an issue was at a car rental company (at SFO of all places), where they insisted that she couldn't be a co-driver because we must not be married, and only married couples or employees could be co-drivers (without an additional fee).
I was eventually able to sort this out with the manager but it made me laugh that in San Francisco of all places, they would judge my wife for not changing her last name.
That’s crazy with the car rental, I wonder if that was just a rogue employee.
As for picking up kids, every place I take my kids to (school, camps, daycare, etc) require you to specifically list who is allowed to pick up their kid, no matter what their last name is. Even if you have the same last name, they aren’t going to hand the kid over unless you are on the list.
It would be crazy to let anyone pick up any kid with the same last name. Think about all the Garcias and Smiths and Kims in the world… they could pick up so many kids! Plus, most kidnappings are done by family members; any institution who hands over a kid just because the name is the same is going to open themselves up to so much liability.
The employee was a young female, which made it even a bit more ironic IMO. I don't know exactly why she believed their policy was that my wife had to have the same last name as me, but she was very apologetic when the manager corrected her.
Oh, it's not a problem, until you're a Kuznetsov-father trying to get on a plane with your Kuznetsova-daughter, and you become a suspect of kidnapping until you don't prove it's actually your daughter. After you get your mortally scared daughter back from authorities, you probably start thinking that having the same surname is something you actually need.
And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.
As someone who has a different last name to my child, I constantly encounter really weird issues where people assume that I don't exist since "First name, Childs last name" doesn't exist in the database.
Really? I am curious to hear an example, because I am struggling to imagine when this would be something they would try to find you by your kids last name.
At the kid’s school, or sports team, or anything where the kid is the primary agent.
For me, it's mostly been in medical settings. I've had particular trouble with public health programs automatically signing me up under my child's last name.
I don't know if my local healthcare catchment just has their software setup wrong, but it's a continual annoyance.
Even the assumption that people have (something that can be used as) a last name is incorrect.
Currently I'm living in Indonesia, where a surprisingly large number of people have just one name (plus, when they have many, they're more often than not completely arbitrary).
This was very common practice up to the '90s. If you have a single name, they duplicate it in your passport, and you end up like "Soekarno Soekarno". Which STILL raises eyebrows in several western countries' ignorant airline employees (and sometime even immigration officers, though they're admittedly more well educated about such issues).
Nowadays they proactively give at least two names to their children to match the western(-ized) system assumptions.
I have experienced visa issues due to name differences in papers while traveling between Belarus and Russia. Monetary arguments were necessary to get through.
But this was also over a decade ago.
If the border guards are just looking for an excuse to take a bribe then it doesn't really matter what you do, they'll surely find something anyways.
Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa? That is completely separate thing.
If you mean different last names as your travel partner, I don’t understand why you having different last names would matter? Doesn’t each person have their own visa?
It sounds like you were just being shaken down. It didn’t matter what your name was, they just picked something bullshit to shake you down with.
> Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa?
It's not precisely stated in the GP, but most probably that one. Background: Russian and Belarusian spelling of names are slightly different, the latter being orthographically closer to the phonetic value. (The current Belarusian president-for-life is globally known as "Alexander Lukashenko", which is a transliteration from Russian; the Belarusian spelling, again transliterated, is "Alyaksandar Lukashenka". For the originals, see his Wikipedia page.)
N.B. I'm writing this as a non-expert in either of the languages, but I can read Russian.
I'm not fully following. Are your last names extremely similar but different, and are you also maintaining citizenship in a foreign country that uses gendered last names? Because that's the crux of the issue. Otherwise it sounds like you might be discussing a tangentially related but different point.
I had a Greek friend born in America who was assigned her father's masculine gendered surname. Her birth was not registered in Greece. When she went to register in Greece as an adult, it created loads of issues due to her surname being incorrect from a Greek perspective. It required a lot of paperwork and fees be cause the Greek system was not set up at the time to handle that correctly.
On the flip side, her mother had a number of issues in the US having an almost identical yet different surname as her husband and daughter. Less extreme but frequently people would mess up the mom or the child's surname when entering records because they'd give the surnames a quick glance and incorrectly assume they were identical. She said there were often times where systems were designed with the faulty assumption that the child would have the same name as a parent.
Now, she effectively has two surnames depending on which passport she uses. Because it's easier for her to maintain names that correspond with the different systems.
I think the gist of your argument is "they should have just kept their separate, original, gendered surnames", and I agree, that is generally the path of least resistance.
Nevertheless, the issue is real in the sense that many countries will e.g. "anglicize" your name when issueing you documentation, e.g. if your name includes characters they do not know how to handle. Having a single person with mismatching documentation _can_ cause issues. E.g. consider having two passports, with different names in them, and it's easy to see how this can cause problems.
My wife and child are regularly stopped at the border if I’m not with them, because they don’t have the same surname. I live in the UK.
I remember it being a problem in the US in the 2000s when airlines would group families together and if you have different last names, they wouldn't do it. I guess now they don't group or go by tickets instead of considering last names.
This doesn’t check out - If you had a common last name would you be grouped with a rando ?
It makes more sense to group by ticket group: buy 4 tickets then this keep them grouped
As far as I know, it's always been grouped by reservation / record locator. Like... the airlines do know how to sell more than one ticket at a time and remember that fact.
These days they're more likely to a splitting groups up on purpose to encourage juicy "known seat" upgrades.
A 20 euro-plus per seat each-way tax on people with insecure partners.
@patio11, I realize "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [0] does disclaim comprehensiveness, but gendered last names seem a worthwhile inclusion.
0. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities themselves for a change.
I recall some TV program long ago mentioning the police had trouble with Russians because sometimes they think there's a whole gang and it's really just one guy whose name got corrupted in 5 different ways.
Depending on the Russian name and the local language there can be many ways to screw things up. Like Elena might get written down as Helen somewhere and Lena somewhere else. And that's just for viable normal names.
It's not even necessarily corruption; we address each other by different names depending on context.
To acquaintances, I might be a Pavel; to close friends, I might be Pasha. To my mom, I'm Pavlik. In a business or other more formal setting, I would be Pavel Dmitrievich.
I think it's a common complaint when reading Russian novels, non-Russians get confused about who's who because of these types of shifts. And it totally makes sense; at least my various nicknames start with the same letter, but many Russian "short" names don't particularly resemble the full name. Who would expect Aleksandr to be Sasha, if you didn't grow up in the culture?
To be fair, that can be a problem with English too. The short form of Robert is Bob, the short form of Richard is Dick.
There was a hilarious one in Ireland where we were desperatly searching for a prolific polish criminal named "Prawo Jazdy". Which means... driving license.
https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...
As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.
Now I'm trying to figure out how one would write out Matthew in Cyrillic, which has two phonemes that are as much of a nightmare for Russian-speakers as "ы" and "р" are for English-speakers. "Мэтью", maybe?
Let's not equate Cyrillic to Russian. Cyrillic is also a script of multiple other languages, including Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (when Serbs feel like using it).
Answering your question - basically, this comes down to the traditions of the languages.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі
https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи
Do you go with the phonetic option, or do you just use the Cyrillic for the name of the writer of the Gospel?
(It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)
Russian names for most Biblical figures, early saints etc all derive from Byzantian Greek versions of the same, usually transcribed more or less phonetically to what was the closest pronunciation in Old Slavic language at the time.
Although it's not quite that simple because the original version of Cyrillic actually has a bunch of extraneous letters that are there solely to represent the distinctions in Greek; in some cases, distinctions that were themselves historical in Greek by that time even. For example, three letters for /i/: I (corresponding to iota), И (corresponding to eta), and Ѵ (corresponding to upsilon), all of which were already pronounced the same in contemporary Greek, and this carried over to Slavic languages as well.
In other cases the distinction became nativized though. E.g. Greek theta, already pronounced as /θ/ in Greek, became the Cyrillic Ѳ - but the closest they could get to pronounce it was [f], and so it came to have the same meaning as Ф, and eventually Ѳ was just dropped as unneeded. Thus e.g. transliteration of Matthew is Матфей, and a bunch of other words where most European languages have "t" or "th" sounds have "ф" in East Slavic languages: e.g. "arithmetic" is "арифметика". But then some words were borrowed into Russian from Latin as well, or from other languages that borrowed them via Latin, and so sometimes theta became /t/: "mathematics" - "математика".
Geez, you left yourselves behind. We Greeks at some point decided that 3 /i/'s are just not enough for us, so we invented some diphthongs (ει, οι) also pronounced /i/ :D
> is John Juan when he's in Mexico?
For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.
James/Jacob is even messier! They come from the same name, but are in English treated as completely distinct names. In the New Testament Greek, you get Ἰακώβ (iakob) used for Old-Testament-era Jacobs (primarily the one later given the name Israel, but also the one in Matthew 1:15–16), and Ἰάκωβος (iakobus) used for New-Testament-era Jameses (two of Jesus’ disciples, and one of his brothers). English Bibles have ended up using Jacob for the old and James for the new ones, but not all languages maintain the distinction: in Telugu, for example, they’re all యాకోబు (yakobu).
It's simpler than that. The Koine Greek transliteration became established long before that particular Jesus was born. It was a common name in a region that belonged to various Greek-speaking empires for centuries, at least nominally. The transliteration was based on the pronunciation used at the time, with a masculine suffix to make the name less awkward in Greek.
And then people wrote the texts that would become the New Testament in Greek, because it was the dominant language around the Eastern Mediterranean.
It’s also something uniquely modern that we consider a person to have “one true and real name” - something completely unheard of until quite recently.
> one true and real name
Egyptian mythology would like a word with you. Specially the part where Isis created a snake to bite Ra so that she could learn his true name. But yea, adapting names to foreign languages was a normal thing until recently.
Fair enough, the societies and cultures that had one true real name were very adamant about letting no one know it, ever
Yep, a relative of mine, Joseph (Irish last name) became José when he was a Gaucho in Argentina.
My given name is Anthony, and I have this problem. I grew up in Australia, and visit some family in Poland every other year. The Australian pronunciation of my name is particularly incompatible with Polish, so I change it from 'ænθəni' to (something like) 'ɑːntɒni'. The 'æ' sound at the start of my name is totally foreign, and if I start introducing myself in Polish, then say my name the way an Australian would, the entire sentence just sounds too weird. Obviously Polish people are familiar with Western culture, and have probably seen the name before, but it just sounds too strange when used in spoken Polish.
The sound [æ] is not entirely foreign to Polish and some other Slavic languages. It often shows up as an allophone of /a/ when it's between two "soft" (palatalized) consonants (e.g. the first /a/ in the word "niania"). The problem for us learning it is that it's not a separate phoneme, and worse yet, the environment in which it occurs in Slavic languages doesn't correspond to anything in English - and, conversely, in English it appears in environments where it could only be [a] or [ɛ] in Slavic languages.
The name itself is, of course, originally Roman, and it's also the name of many Christian saints, so basically every Christian country (not even necessarily a Western one) will be aware of it and have some version of it; for Polish that's be "Anton", I think, same as in Russian.
This doesn't happen in my speech, I certainly pronounce both <a>'s as [a] in "niania". [ɛ] is different, it certainly becomes [e] after palatalized consonants. I agree that people cannot tell the difference intuitively, though.
This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine.
(There's a separate issue here where a system for a specific pair of languages might get codified and become "frozen in time" even as either or both languages evolve. For example, the Russian Polivanov system for transliterating Japanese uses "си" for "シ" because the standard pronunciation of "щ" at the time was more like "шч", similar to Ukrainian, so it was clearly the wrong choice back then - and yet clearly the right choice now if not for backwards compatibility concerns.)
Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.
AFAIK Nihon-shiki is designed to reflect the Japanese kanas and their traditional regular arrangement as close as possible - note that it also uses e.g. "tu" for ツ.
OTOH Polivanov seemingly tried to reflect actual pronunciation, thus ツ is "цу" (tsu), ふ is "фу" (fu), を is "о", は is "ва" (va) when it's a particle, the syllabic nasal is "m" in environments where it is so pronounced etc.
The only real mystery about Polivanov system from this perspective is why ち is "ти" (ti) and not "чи" (chi).
The transliteration conventions also change over time. Double "e" in my last name has been transliterated into English as "eye" in the past. As a bonus - add permutations with and without patronym.
I use up all the fields for alternative names on all the forms.
Chinese people rarely change their surnames after marriage; kids usually inherit the father's surname and that's it. This has never caused any issues; systems I've interacted with have been totally OK with the idea that the parents can have different surnames from each other.
Chinese living in the west also will sometimes adopt a western name.
Many Singaporean Chinese IDs have an English name, the dialectal Chinese name, and the Mandarin readings of the same characters, resulting in "Harry Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)".
> will sometimes adopt a western name
Yep, none of the women in my family have changed their name when the got married. Long marriages, kids, and no issues so far.
That's a problem within the EU already, no need to travel across the globe. A Bulgarian family moving to Germany would face that exact problem. I hope we can eventually lobby the EU to recognise and allow gendered surnames across the Union, since it is part of our language and culture.
most EU countries if not all of them should already recognize different family names for both partners. where it gets tricky is the children.
what we really need to recognize globally is that languages change names. and that Kuznetsov in german or english is equivalent to Kuznetsova or Kuznetsov in russian or bulgarian and for example 库兹尼佐夫 or 库兹内佐娃 in chinese. in china i had to get a notarized translation of my name for official purposes.
passports could contain name entries in multiple languages to cover the most important differences. your native version, and english/western version and any others if you live in a foreign country where a translation of your name is necessary.
This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)
If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.
However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.
It's very hard to erode it because Russian, as all Slavic languages, is very thoroughly gendered in general. It's not just nouns (including names) and pronouns, but adjectives and verbs also have gender that must agree with the noun they apply to.
Coincidentally, this actually makes it possible to have names that don't conform to the standard gender patterns without much confusion, because as soon as you start talking about what the person is like or what they're doing, you have to specify the gender anyway, so the marker on the noun is mostly redundant.
But also Russia in particular has a long-standing cultural tradition of Russifying foreign names of immigrants. For example, Americans don't have patronymics, but when you get Russian citizenship, they will ask you for the name of your father and assign one accordingly - so e.g. John, son of Donald, would become Джон Дональдович. Similarly last names are often modified by appending -ов or -eв, although this is less common today. Anyway, a name of clearly Slavic origin like "Elena Kuznetsov" would almost certainly be nativized if that person immigrate.
This usually doesn't apply to non-immigrants, though. Thus e.g. Barbara Liskov is still Барбара Лисков in Russian, not Лискова. Which makes it very confusing when a native speaker first sees the last name and confidently decides that it's male.
There are also some weird cases where names with obvious Slavic patterns are not re-nativized for political reasons. For example, Isaac Asimov is originally Исаак Озимов, which has very clear markers of a Russian Jewish name. When his stories were translated to Russian in late Soviet era, though, his name was rendered as Айзек Азимов (i.e. a direct transliteration of English), and it's been said that this was a conscious choice by translators because that way it didn't sound Jewish, which helped get it past censors when "anti-Zionism" was particularly prevalent in USSR.
Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility.
In fact, that's one way to guess/cold-read some information about a person. If you meet an Elena Kuznetsov in America, odds are pretty decent that she was born to Russian parents here.
It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last names that got inherited over multiple generations.
So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.
As everyone said already, the gendering isn't something just cultural, it's baked into the grammar. Specially because of grammatical case, different genders have different inflections. In a setting like "Let's call Kuznetsov(a)" accusative case applies, so Kuznezov would become Kuznetsova, Kuznetsova would become Kuznetsovu. Gender-neutral speech is absolutely impossible without overhauling the whole grammar, not just pronouns like in English. And yes, to a unaccustomed Russian ear applying third-person plural "they" to as indefinite-gendered singular sounds weird - and singular neutral "it" is just degrading, as I think it is in English.
Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist.
They can exist, but sound weird in the language.
Most (though not all) Greek surnames are also gendered. The common practice is to inherit your fathers surname, changing the gender if you're born female. For example, a quite common surname is Papadopoulos (masculine) / Papadopoulou (feminine). It was usually chopped into "Pappas" when Greek immigrants to US were passing through Ellis Island.
Till the '90s at least there was an unofficial convention of anglicizing our surnames using the masculine form, ending up with things like Eleni (Helen) Papadopoulos, which in Greek sounds like a grammatical monstrosity.
Other surnames were commonly mangled in weird ways - Nicholas Metropolis (of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) surname was Μητρόπουλος (Mitropoulos). Metropolis is quite near phonetically but grammatically makes no sense in Greek.
> people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist.
is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
Countries are inconsistent in what names they do and do not accept.
Want a name that is offensive in your language? Your country probably won't let you do that, but some other one might, and yours still needs to accept that name as valid.
You can't just go to another country and change your name there, but if you have dual citizenship, you can usually change it in either one, and the other one needs to respect that.
I had a former coworker who had just (legally) changed his entire name in order to fully separate himself from his family when he started with the company. (This was in the US.) It made the onboarding kind of weird, because he originally gave us one name but then when he started had an entirely different one.
You sure can! But that doesn't mean it won't cause you problems.
For example, if you're male, and decide to change your name to Sarah, you totally can - but don't be surprised when people assume you're a woman.
And there are many countries, of which you are unaware, that do have pretty strict laws about what you are and aren't allowed to name your children. Iceland is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head. As I recall, Germany also has some limitations.
I think you misread my comment? I said:
> You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
Like in Germany can you name your kid "The Holocaust Didn't Happen"? No right?
You're right. I absolutely did misread your comment. That's what I get for trying to read on a single cup of coffee.
In the US, I'm not sure there are any laws about what you can be named. I'm not a lawyer though.
I don't think you can name your kid $()*&@Q%&
Well, Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, so I don't know.
People's own opinions about what their name is is not a "non-issue", shitty-ass governments or not. Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.
> Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.
My point was governments do this all the time and it is a far cry from fascism. Elsewhere in the thread, it is mentioned that often times you have to compromise when registering a name in a different country (for instance, if the language does not contain a phoneme used in your name). In that case, you have to conform to the country's culture and language. Under that lens, banning names that violate cultural norms is not so crazy.
There are reasonable regulations and unreasonable regulation. The idea that since some regulation exist, it would be totally the allow any other rule is absurd.
Yes, people (specifically women) with strong opinion on the suffix of their name exist and proper solution of government is to butt off that decision. This is no the norm worth keeping by force.
The relevant laws in many Western countries today exist so that children don't get saddled with patently stupid names by their parents (see also: Elon Musk and his kids).
Me and my wife are from different countries and we didn't change our names specifically because of these kind of problems. Name changes across border-boundaries are a huge pain.
(In Sweden the man sometimes adds his wife's last name to his own)
Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with different variations of their last names in English when immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.
Just taking this opportunity to vent.
When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from
First: Jane
Middle: Ann
Last: Smith
First: Jane
Middle: Smith
Last: Mylastname
First: Jane
Middle: [none]
Last: Smith Mylastname (no hyphen, just a space)
Given names: Jane Smith
Last: Mylastname
"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"
for which privilege we get to pay $75.
Good grief.
> The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally
Are you sure?
SSA has administrative offices that deal with data errors. Generally in a GSA high rise in a big city. NOT the offices where you go to get benefits.
Someone doing data entry for the SSA fat fingered some info about me back when I was born, and I only found out in the 2010s thanks to the IRS rejecting a tax filing (I had to pay a 50 cent late fee!!!).
Went in-person to their office in the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago and the lady spent a few minutes examining documents, typed on her computer for about 20 seconds, and that was that. All fixed.
No kidding? That'd be way better, if so. I'll check into that. Thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah I think also this is the correct path to try first. Some mistakes like that can be fixed.
> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper
For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state.
I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done.
Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.
>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name
I know this pain.
What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.
I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.
Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.
Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it.
I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.
Just realized the modern equivalent of of little Johhny Drop Tables; would be some LLM prompt injection scheme.
Europe is much worse about that than the US.
Many countries don't let you change your name at all unless you have an extremely strong reason to do so. Others have strict requirements on what an acceptable name is, and foreign-sounding names are often not allowed. Denmark straight up gives you a whitelist of allowed names to choose from.
And then there's Ireland where your name is whatever you can prove people call you
That’s basically California about legal names.
My first name is an old family name. I’m the 8th to have it. My kid’s the 9th. I go by my middle name. My mom and dad and sisters call me that. My wife calls me that. My doctor calls me that. My first name would be an AKA, an alias. Literally no one calls me by that name.
And that’s why my credit union is one that would issue me a debit card in my legal name, which is to say my legal name. Other banks have strict rules to call me by my alias, so I don’t use them.
Side note: I’m way sympathetic to people who’ve changed their names and want to be called something else. Use my first name with me and I know you’re someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me. You’re a stranger. I don’t identify with it at all.
One of my friends recently did some logistics work with a bunch of pacific islanders, to organise them all to come to a conference in Australia.
In the local language of one of the countries, they say the family name first. For example, "Smith Mary". The passport & visa offices had gotten confused, and this poor guy ended up with a passport with their first and last names around the wrong way. And they got a visa to Australia with the names the right way around. The problem was only discovered a day or two before they travelled. And of course, you can't use a visa if the name on the visa doesn't match your passport. Even if the name on the visa is correct!
It was a huge headache. My friend managed to escalate the problem through DFAT (Australia's state department) and they managed to issue a new visa in time which matched their passport. Ie, they issued a visa which also had this guy's name wrong.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that their colleagues thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Apparently they kept making fun of the guy for it and started calling him the wrong name on purpose. Pacific islanders are the best. I think they were from Kiribati or Samoa.
You actually got a space on the drivers license?
When I moved to California and got a drivers license (easiest test process of my life, as a European, but that's another story), they dropped the space in my two word last name. Reads quite odd now. I always figured it was an all round America quirk to not have spaces in last names.
Don't "change" the name, get the name "corrected".
Source: I pretty much ran into the exact same thing.
Fairly usual stuff, I can relate to that!
I was born in France, I then had my last name changed to add my mother’s maiden name to my last name, and I can legally use either, my French id shows my name and my “usage name”.
Fast forward a few years, I settled in the UK, got naturalised, they dropped all the diacritics and kept only my “usage name” as my last name. You can also change name as many times as you like in the UK, they really don’t care, they’re pretty good at tracking it.
I then got my Italian citizenship by ancestry and there they’re the exact opposite of the British: only under very specific circumstances can you change your name, it has to be a matter of life and death pretty much. So they took my original French name, including the diacritics that nobody knows how to type on an Italian keyboard.
Now I live in Italy, with a different name than my British name, or my French “usage name”, and I have to explain to the clerks how to find me on their system (with my tax code) because they can’t type my name properly.
Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII.
The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.
A clean paper trail is only possible if everyone always enters your name in exactly how you spell it. That's not realistic though.
If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it.
Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong.
And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages.
Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character.
This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u'
Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
There's no ü in ASCII (the 1967 US-ASCII everyone thinks of, anyways, which is all you can expect from the government). It's in ISO 646:CH though, where it replaces '}', and in Latin 1.
> Is their database a 7-bit database?
Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
Do people think of this as 8-bit ASCII ? I've never heard of it referred to ASCII until now. In fact, I've never heard of it at all (by the time I was old enough to know what a character encoding was, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 were totally dominant IIRC).
In DOS days, codepage 437 was commonly referred to as "ASCII" colloquially in countries where some other encoding was in use for the national script.
Interesting to know, thanks!
Yup, what the GP said. It was a common mistake for people to assume ASCII included CP 437 characters back in the DOS days. Even I made that assumption when I was a kid.
'u' isn't wrong in America. We spell it Zurich. And in China, it's 苏黎世 (or at least that's what Google tells me).
Don't think of government ascii as the entire ascii code page. Instead think of it as what's on a typewriter. You get 0-9 and A-Z along with a few punctuation characters.
Not very helpful - my typewriter has an ü :)
And I'm sure Chinese typewriters have a totally different charset then German ones.
ASCII is a 7-bit code. Ü is not a part of ASCII any more than say Ł is (it's in one of many 8-bit extensions of ASCII)
Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than one capital letter in it.
ü is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?
Oh that makes sense. ASCII is 7-bit. so they could be depending on old 7-bit databases.
No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard. Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now. It's just that the people can't type any of those characters.
Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have ü.
But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.
You can’t expect a bureaucrat to know about that kind of thing! If it’s not printed on a key right in front of their nose then no government employee is going to be able to type it in.
But that’s not really the point. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts the clerk at the DMV memorizes there is always going to be some text that they just cannot reproduce accurately. Whether it’s an accented character from the exotic land of Spain or some real Zalgo, something is going to get lost. No individual human can correctly deal with all possible textual forms.
This is probably a Dosbox system from the 90’s, with COBOL batch processing in the backend.
if they can't type it on a keyboard when manually copying it from one place to another they'll drop it is what I've come to expect.
> Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii
That is not true. Type “man ascii” on macOS or Linux to see everything that is part of ascii.
> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy
That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß.
Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are.
My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it.
Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o.
The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)
I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.
^ comes from typewriters, where it was used to type letters like â by backing the caret and typing over the last letter. Similarly ' could be used for acute accent - hence why it didn't get a separate letter - and ` for grave accent.
By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.
I know these characters now have lives of their own, but they emerged as shorthands for "ae" and "ss" respectively (where the first s was the long kind that looks like an 'f').
My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)
> How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name?
It does not directly bother me but can lead to downstream inconveniences. Public services (in Germany) ime don't like mismatches in identifiers, especially inconsistent ones. If it is required then it might sometimes take more than one application (with a small explanation on why the mismatch is there).
As another example, if ä is substituted for ae in shipping addresses then automatic tracking for packages by DHL via my customer account breaks (as the address is not identical anymore).
It's a question of scope, though.
Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ?
I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
ASCII isn't even enough for English.
And yes absolutely we should bring Ð / Þ back for English use and drop those ridiculous digraphs.
I saw online that people moving to Japan can sometimes take months to get a bank account because the systems aren't there designed to handle middle names. If you want to maximize your child's ability to move around, I guess go with an ASCII first name-last name, which works almost everywhere. Except Iceland!
Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.
And this is even the case in Europe.
There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.
Hah. The kicker of that story has a familiar ring.
My Dad used to own a liquor store back in the 70s, with his name on the sign (let's call it "Arthur's Liquor"). It was in a rough part of town. One day when I was a teenager, in the 90s, we were driving by and he saw the sign was still there, so he stopped and we went in. There's a Korean guy and his wife behind the counter.
Dad: Just wondering, who's Arthur?
Wife points to her husband.
Shop owner: Me. I'm Arthur.
Dad: No, I'm Arthur.
I'm just like, Dad, can we get out of here now?
Moving to a country that doesn't speak English has taught me just how many pronunciations of my last name there are. It's never really bothered me, though, and 90% of the time I'll introduce myself with the "wrong" one. It's easier for everyone.
Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.
What gets me is the people who decide not to call me by the name I specifically introduce myself with.
I have a nasal vowel in my name that, so far in my life, only French and Portuguese speakers have pronounced properly.
I learned English in the US young enough that no one guesses I'm not native, and I anglicized my name so that it could be pronounced easily. It is what I go by.
I introduce myself with this adopted pronunciation. People often ask me how to pronounce it in French, so I tell them, but reiterate that I go by the anglicized pronunciation.
Inevitably, those folks start using their wrong attempt at French and I have to correct them and tell them I go by the anglicized pronunciation.
Edit: strong feelings had, obviously.
Yeah. Every time someone asks me, "but how do you really pronounce it", I do a big internal sigh and resign myself to the next 10 minutes being a useless pronunciation lesson.
And when they somehow come away satisfied that their wrong pronunciation works... ugh.
I will say though, I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name, and I do expect the same courtesy in return. I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
> I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name... I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
It's hard to square this with all of the frustration you're expressing in your other comments.
> And when they somehow come away satisfied that their wrong pronunciation works... ugh.
Whatever the outcome, I'm just pleased that that particular conversation has come to an end.
I'm also Pavel, and it just seems to be one of those names that native English speakers have trouble with.
Protip: it seems to help if you stick an accent on "a": "Pável". In US, people have usually seen enough Spanish to interpret this more or less correctly, and of course it also doubles as a stress marker.
That said, personally, I often don't bother and also go with the default [ˈpei.vɪl] just because it's easier to go with the flow.
> it's easier to go with the flow.
Yep.
I've told people that my name has been mangled sufficiently, that when people discuss gravel, I snap my head in their direction.
I grew up in the US and didn't realize for quite a few years that most people pronounce my last name differently than my family does. After a while I decided that they were right, and just rolled with it. Our pronunciation is closer to the original spelling we see in old genealogy docs. I have no idea why they changed it. Maybe universal literacy wasn't such a thing back then. "What's your last name?" "Suchandsuch." "Is that spelled like [...]?" "Yeah, sure, I guess?"
But I grew up around a lot of Polish families, and my classmates had the annual fun of explaining to our teachers that "Salchow" is pronounced like "Sargrow". I won't complain to much about people "mispronouncing" mine.
> I grew up in the US and didn't realize for quite a few years that most people pronounce my last name differently than my family does. After a while I decided that they were right, and just rolled with it.
I technically mispronounce my own name, and always have. Same thing happened, just a generation or two up.
I'm in the process of changing my name to one that fits the country I live in, for similar reasons. It's just easier for everyone. Names are a tool for communicating with other people, they're not who you are.
I'm hispanic and my two last names are Garcia Garcia. That is two last names that just happen to be the same.
When I moved to the US I could have dropped one or hyphenate them. I decided to keep it as-is, and use "Garcia Garcia" as my last name (space and all).
Besides confusing amongs americans and people always confusing one Garcia for middle name and one for last name, I had almost no problems. One time an airline messed up my plane ticket (again by dropping one of the Garcias) but that's it.
I appreciate other people have different experiences, I definitely met folks who have changed their names to conform to american customs and make things easier.
If I saw your name in a CRM system, as a USican, I would assume that some dumbass on my team accidentally pasted your last name into the field twice.
In Indonesia, many Javanese people traditionally have only one name. When they migrate to countries like Singapore, where a surname is required, they often use their given name as both their first and last name. As a result, you may see names such as Chandra Chandra or Supardi Supardi.
Nowadays the Indonesian law requires at least two words for the person's full name, and the full name is regarded as a single entity no matter how many words it contains. Older generations of Javanese, having only a single name, usually duplicate it - I have seen such duplicate names in official Indonesian documents.
Or you get something like Someone FNU. Where FNU at some point meant 'first name unknown', but is now the person's last name at least in the people I've known... But I see references to it ending up as their firstname, so FNU Someone, which would make a little more sense, but is still pretty bizarre. Someone Someone seems like the best way to handle it, assuming single names aren't allowed (because yeah)
> In response to 9/11, Congress had passed the REAL ID Act, requiring a new type of identification to board domestic flights [...] (It’s been postponed twice since then. The new deadline is now 2027, wink wink.)
For anyone reading this...this isn't true. It finally actually went into effect on May 7, 2025.
EDIT: I HAVE witnessed someone at a TSA checkpoint at an airport get turned away because they didn't have a REAL ID.
The final rule on REAL ID published earlier this year announced a 2-year phased implementation option for federal agencies. There were some indications at the that TSA intended to use that option for air travel, though no information on specific phased implementation plans was ever released, and the full enforcement at the May 7 date was implemented. This is probably the source of confusion (though such a basic fact, 5 months after the full enforcement date, should not have been missed.)
Interesting that he went from Giovanni to Joe. Giovanni is more directly cognate to John (both derive from Hebrew/Aramaic Yohanan via Greek Ioannes) while Joe is usually short for Joseph (Giuseppe in Italian, also from Hebrew).
I wonder what would happen if the author were to legally change his name from what's on his birth certificate (4 names) to his passport (3 names). Then when the documents don't match, you have a name change order that explains why. The explanation in this case is wrong, but it does give you a piece of legal paperwork accounting for the discrepancy that should satisfy most bureaucrats.
Of course, it's not fun to give up your identity and nobody should have to do that, but it might make it easier to exist in the American "you must have 3 names" world.
> In fact, authorities in New York never actually wrote down anyone’s name, they just checked each immigrant against the ship’s passenger list, which would have been compiled by employees of the steamship companies. That means that your grandpa Szymańczyk turned into Simmons before he even set foot on the boat.
So many people refuse to understand this. It's a fact they simply reject.
> I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries.
I'm as Anglo as they come, and I have four names. In practice, yeah, I often have to choose a middle name if a form has space for one (1) middle initial or middle name.
But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things, and those things will believe what the client believes, on pain of the client finding someone who will go along with their vision, no matter how grand, blinkered, purblind, or otherwise constrained that vision may be. Blaming programmers is, therefore, very often wrong.
I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. But so many people seem to think their systems need surname, firstname, middle name, etc. all separated. I rarely see an actual need for this. If you want to know what to call them informally, have that be a separate field that you prompt them for.
> I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules.
This is the morally correct solution, but governments run on forms and forms run on fields and fields were created by people who knew, as a matter of absolute ontological certainty, that names are FIRST MIDDLE-INITIAL LAST with a possibly blank MIDDLE-INITIAL. As for letters, if it isn't on Ethel's typewriter it doesn't exist.
If you want to protest the form, line forms over there, face-down, nine-edge first.
> But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things
These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”
I was born in the UK, but am now a US citizen.
My parents gave me two middle names. It's not that uncommon in the UK, but due to the length of my names, they don't all fit on a US passport. They force you to choose to truncate or omit some of them. OK, no problem.
But I also hold a UK passport, and the UK passport has a rule that your name must be the same on any other foreign identification, or they won't issue or re-issue a passport. Due to the US length limitation, this was impossible.
Renewing my UK passport wasn't impossible, but it was annoying. None of the automated methods worked, and I had to actually get someone on the phone so I could explain the problem.
The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field on some official documents for this reason.
Most interesting case I've come across was a guy who just had one name. No surname or anything. He was once questioned by police (regarding a theft in the shop he worked in) and explained that his parents were "a bit weird". He was originally American, so apparently that's also a possibility there? And apparently the Dutch system allowed it, although the police seemed to struggle with it and may have duplicated his name.
In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler.
It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...
In America (well in my state, everywhere does it slightly differently) you can't really give people multiple middle names, all you really do is give them a single middle name with a space in it.
source: gave my children fancy names
I have a kind of similar situation as I have 3 names and one surname but since birth I have always used and been called onky with my first name and surname, the 2 other names being useful to distinguish me from homonyms. Having moved to Spain, most entities (state, banks, insurances...) insist on moving my last name as a first surname. And many people call me using my second name and third name, including at work. It always sounds so strange to me and it takes me time to realise people are adressing me.
Example (not my real names): born as Alexander William Harry Smith, and having been called Alexander Smith all my life, people here in Spain unilaterally decide to call me William Harry or Don Harry all the time.
Thanksfully I have no need nor plan to apply for citizenship.
Interesting read — and honestly, this isn’t unique to the U.S. or Mexico. Bureaucratic inefficiency and siloed systems seem to be universal in government operations. What’s missing isn’t just “digitization,” but true digital transformation — interoperable systems, shared data standards, and accountability built into the process.With AI advancing so fast, I wonder if we’ll see tools or frameworks that can actually help governments move past legacy workflows instead of just automating the same inefficiencies.
The real insight here isn't about interoperability—it's that we've been treating identity as a data integrity problem when it's actually a semantic mapping problem. Giovanni's "F" isn't a bug, it's a feature of systems designed around Anglo naming conventions trying to force-fit multicultural reality into rigid schemas.
Even perfect APIs won't solve this. Names carry cultural context that gets lost in translation between bureaucratic systems. We need identity architectures that embrace semantic ambiguity rather than eliminate it.
What would a name system look like if it was designed for a multicultural world from the ground up?
A few years ago I was unable to register a new Australian company via the automated systems because one of our directors has a hyphenated middle name and the various agencies concerned normalised this in differing ways, leading to rejection at a validation step. Resolving this turned a process of a few minutes into a multi-week telephonic saga.
I subsequently learned that many folks faced with the same problem simply didn’t bother and instead left intentionally erroneous/incomplete (but consistent, and thereby validating) data in the registers.
An Aussie friend has a hyphenated last name and has had so many headaches in her life due to it she made everyone she knew swear they wouldn’t inflict that on their future children
Reading this, it seems like the naturalization process which he changed his name during, doesn't really signal that there was a change of names.
Like normally if you changed your name (in America) you'd have a wedding certificate or a document from the court that you could use to show continuity but instead you're just allowed to put whatever you want on the citizenship form?
> I spent a few days at home weighing my options. Could my parents find other Mexican documents with my original name?
Keep your official documents, guys. Even if you think they're obsolete.
I don't get why various governments/systems/etc have an obsession with the first name + last name format. It just has so many assumptions that fall over so quickly. Why can't we treat name as a single, generally opaque field and leave it at that? Exactly whose day is being ruined by not having a perfectly sanitised first name and last name?
My impression by living in NZ for a while now that I can call myself anything I want.
I've been asked to verify my identity only when setting up bank account, sorting out visa/tax with my sponsoring employer. After that it's only when leaving/entering country.
For my own convenience I use an english name to save barista butchering my name and feeling bad about it.
Naming kids was an exercise in linguistics. In Lithuanian we have some fun accidents like Justinas (just in ass) and Arminas (arm in ass)...
In NZ there are restrictions on what you can't name a child (titles that represent royalty e.g. "king" or certain positions, e.g. "justice", or ones that can lead to excessive mockery, e.g. "sex fruit"), but the line seems to be hazy as "Number 16 Bus Shelter" was apparently permitted.
As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it.
But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.
Not sure if that's of any comfort, but don't feel singled out: this naming issue happens _all the time_, in all countries, to everyone. I'm French, and had constant issues with naming and identification, whether I lived in western Europe, Eastern Europe, or Asia.
- I have acute (é) accents in my first and last name. This seems to create different problems for each system my name is interacting with. Sometimes the letters just disappear, sometimes it's replaced with 'e or e' because the clerk didn't know how to type é, sometimes the accent is just missing and becomes e, sometimes the clerk tries to be fancy and copy paste é in their system, but it only works locally and I then I'm named with �.
- French usually have a primary first name, 1 or 2 secondary first names, and a last name. In practice the additional first names are more or less used like American middle names, but legally speaking they are first names, there are no middle names in France. That means for most foreign countries where you can only have a single first name, it becomes the concatenation of all your first names. You are not "John" anymore, you are "John Bob Max", this is your first name from now on.
- Obviously concatenating first names creates stupidly long first names, so you will not really be "John Bob Max", but rather "John BM".
- I France when you have kids, you can decide for them to bear the father's name, the mother's name, or a concatenation of both. That concatenation can only be done with a space though, as hyphen-separated names are considered a single word. Most countries (e.g. Canada) have conflicting rules on this, meaning they will forcefully replace hyphens with spaces and vice versa.
- Overall clerks (in Europe especially) are not careful with inputting names in their systems. I would estimate 60% of the time, my name is spelled wrong (typo, character swap, localization, etc). This of course becomes ridiculous as countries are more and more trying to automate a lot of processes, but a single letter mismatch sends you to administrative hell.
My strategy of recent years, which seems to work, is to be *relentless* of having your name right every single time. Drop the accents and non latin1 letters systematically, don't accept any typo, imprecision or shortening, have your full first, middle and last names everywhere.
99% of the time the issues are because the operator/clerk don't want to bother, and think it won't be a huge deal. That's wrong, the snowball effect is real and painful. Once your name is wrong anywhere, it cascades in a nightmare quite quickly.
If it makes you feel any better; I have no middle name, and fairly short first and last (6 letters each).
My names have been consistently misspelled regardless.
I know a guy with just one name. He puts it in both the first and second name field.
I vaguely remember a story of a family migrating though different writing systems all ending up with different names.
My partner has a first name like XXXdr, which an airline at some point turned into "Dr. XXX".
As a software engineer born outside the anglosphere, I am immensely cautious to have every formal record of my personal details byte-identical.
Obligatory read: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Reminds me of an old friend Oleshargegilolodeleroi* from Kenya who was renamed to "Siloma Kerore" on his US visa.
*: Not 100% sure I'm spelling that correctly. Grok suggests that Oleshargegilgilololdeleroi may be more plausible.
> Famous people named Fenech include [...]
What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?