The Importance of Names
I have always found the ditty, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”, to be a contradiction.
While deliberate name calling can be intimidating and - if ongoing - tantamount to bullying, it seems to me that by not attempting to say someone’s name correctly is not only rude, but - by disregarding the individual’s identity and cultural heritage - hurtful in all respects.
The process of naming of a child entails much care and thought and grounds a child in the specific culture(s) of the home and extended family. Depending on the culture(s) of the family, the child may be named after a loved one, follow a specific naming pattern as was the tradition in Irish families, perhaps be indicative of the qualities one sees/hopes for in the newborn or relates to the day of the week or circumstances at the time of the birth and/or related to the religious tradition of the family.
While you may know (or think you know) quite a lot about someone before you even meet them based on their name, one can always be pleasantly surprised. A recent edition of BBC Fifth Floor entitled, My Name, My Identify (29 December 2017) illustrates this point. Conversely, while certain names are very closely associated with particular cultures it may, for example, be the case that the child with a Greek first name may not be of Greek heritage at all, but perhaps born in Greece while parents worked there or perhaps the parents love all things Hellenic.
I am most acutely aware of the importance of saying an individual’s name correctly and very much appreciate the attention this has been given through the My Name, My Identity campaign by Santa Clara Office of Education in conjunction with National Association for Bilingual Education. This short video is effective and seems to reiterate the statement, “Don’t let anyone else tell how you should say it” in the last line of Mona Chalabi's May 2016 article, Say my name, say my name: why the 'correct' pronunciation is whatever I decide.
Mindful that our students come from all over the world, every day we meet students whose names hail from various diverse cultural and linguistic traditions. A few weeks ago a child was visiting our school. When I asked him his name I was totally flummoxed. I couldn’t put together the sounds I heard. Knowing he was from Mexico, I was anticipating a name like Juan, Miguel or even Pablo (I realize this was a total prejudgment on my part!) and when I looked at the name when he wrote it, I was equally unsure of how to say it. I asked him to say it slowly, syllable by syllable and each time, my pronunciation was a little better. Rather than drawing on Spanish (as I had anticipated), his family drew on the Aztec heritage of Central America. His name? Quetzalcoatl (click here for the pronunciation)
In order to have some strategies for learning names which may initially seem very challenging to say/write, I highly recommend reading Teachers' Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students' Names Correctly.