Hey everyone wondering about other bicultural/bilingual families out there and how they went about deciding on names for their children. I am American and my fiancé is Tanzanian.
So I am just wondering how people went about deciding what naming traditions they were going to use from each culture, both the given names and naming traditions involving first, middle last names, etc.
If you followed one culture, the other or did something totally different and what factors you considered when choosing names.
I don’t have children of my own yet, but I come from a bicultural family and my parents gave us multicultural names with different meanings in different parts of the world. Our names reflect parts of our heritage that aren’t necessarily one of our parents’ nationalities, surprisingly enough. They didn’t tie themselves down.
American and Tanzanian sound like fantastic cultures to combine in names. I particularly like the idea of children having a name from each culture - a first and a middle - which they can choose to alternately as they explore different sides of their heritage.
I come from a bicultural family. My dad is Italian and my mom is Dutch, both are first generation Canadians. Though neither are particularly tied to their heritages, my sister and I did grow up with both cultures (like, we get to celebrate three Christmases: Sinterklaas, [name_u]Christmas[/name_u], and [name_f]Epiphany[/name_f]).
But, like I said, my parents weren’t totally tied to their heritages, and that’s reflective in mine and my sister’s names, [name_f]Nicole[/name_f] and [name_f]Michelle[/name_f]. However, my middle name, [name_f]Dianne[/name_f], does come from my mom’s side since it is based on my great-aunt Dini’s name, and my sister got a more Italian-sounding middle name to honour my dad’s family.
I’m actually a little bit jealous of my sister’s name, because we are closer with our dad’s side than our mom’s and I would love to have an Italian name. So, I guess my advice would be to choose a name that reflects the culture you’re going to raise your kids around.
Maybe you could go with a Tanzanian name, but use an American nickname. That way, your kid can have a name that fits both cultures. Possibly? I don’t know anything about Tanzanian naming customs.
[name_f]Do[/name_f] what feels right for you and your partner
We are definitely hoping to choose names that will work in both countries in case we ever find ourselves moving to the US. I am not sure if we will be giving them middle names as we do at home, still deciding. Most people have three names here, their given name, then their father’s name, then their father’s last name. Some use their second name (father’s first name) as their surname and some use their 3rd name (father’s last name). Debating whether it would be reasonable to give them 4 names or if it would complicate things. I find a lot of things aren’t formatted to take into account other cultures here. For example, on many forms I have to fill out my “tribe”. I don’t know if it would cause confusion & difficulty to give them 2 middle names - one we choose and my fiancé’s name.
We are a bilingual/bicultural family! I am English, my partner is Icelandic and we live in Iceland with our daughter (almost 2) and a son on the way. We are all three bilingual in Icelandic and English, although of course our daughter has not fully mastered any language at her age. All of my partner’s family speak at least passable English, some excellent English, but my family is almost completely monolingual and barely speak a word of Icelandic.
So when we were picking a name for our daughter we had to find something that would work for our situation. We chose Freyja Elísabet. Things we considered:
First and foremost, the name had to work in Iceland since that is where we live and where she will grow up. So to me, that meant picking a name that was used and known in Iceland.
It also had to be a name that was at least pronounceable for monolingual British English speakers, although preferably something that was easy, natural and fit in with both cultures. I also didn’t want to use Icelandic characters like þ, ð or æ, at least not in the first name, because obviously people outside of Iceland tend to have no idea how to pronounce them and they cause issues when travelling outside of Iceland anyway as computer systems often don’t accept ‘special’ characters - some won’t even take accents.
For last names we followed Icelandic traditions and used a patronymic because I wanted my child to fit into Icelandic society. I chose not to use my last name in addition to this because I didn’t want the full name to be too long (it is already quite long).
I wanted to use a second given name because we both have one and it is just ‘normal’ in the UK to have a middle name. My partner would have been quite happy to just name her Freyja, but I wanted to add the Elísabet (which was the runner up for her first name anyway).
I think we picked a good name for our situation as it is well-known to both Icelanders and British people -nobody ever has trouble pronouncing Freyja and it fits in great, being a popular name in the UK as well as Iceland. Things were probably a bit easier for us trying to reconcile two Northern European languages/cultures with a ton of overlap than for you, though!
Names here tend to be either European style names ([name_m]John[/name_m], [name_f]Rose[/name_f], [name_m]Daniel[/name_m], [name_u]James[/name_u], etc are very popular) pronounced with a Swahili accent, Swahili and/or tribal names or English words turned into names (i.e. Happyson, Loveness, [name_m]Innocent[/name_m], Lightness).
Popular names in the US are also becoming more popular here ([name_u]Aiden[/name_u], [name_m]Ethan[/name_m], [name_f]Sophia[/name_f]) and names from pop culture and current events also make surges (there are a lot of [name_m]Barack[/name_m]/Barakas and Obamas under the age eight, though these are both tribal/Swahili names anyway there was a huge surge during his presidency and I am sure [name_m]Donald[/name_m] is fairly popular with babies being born now, due to celebrity not so much agreement with politics).
So we are leaning toward more American names or maybe Swahili, but don’t want anything too popular in either culture and want to make sure the names fit both pronunciation and culture wise in both places. For example, my name [name_f]Amber[/name_f] is very difficult for for people to say here, sounds more like ahmba as “er” is not easy for locals to say. Names & words in Swahili always end in a vowel sound, so even those western names they use, they usually add a vowel sound to the end when speaking ([name_f]Rose[/name_f] is pronounced “[name_f]Rosie[/name_f]”, [name_m]Samuel[/name_m] - “Samweli”). Also, some names aren’t used quite as they are in the US. For example, [name_f]Emma[/name_f] is a popular name here, for boys, as a nickname for [name_m]Emmanuel[/name_m].
Interesting! I love hearing about naming in other cultures and languages. We also have the boy’s name / girl’s name thing with Icelandic as many masculine nicknames sound feminine in an English speaking context, e.g. [name_f]Elli[/name_f] - male nicknames usually all end in i as well which people seem to interpret as more feminine than y or ie. I don’t know that I mind all that much when it’s a nickname as the boy can always use the full name in other contexts. I actually find [name_f]Elli[/name_f] quite cute as a nickname for a boy (it’s used for names like [name_f]El[/name_f]ías or [name_f]Elli[/name_f]ði or Erlingur)!
So it sounds like you may have to go for something that is pronounced somewhat differently in the two languages. I just want to say that you shouldn’t worry about that if you are personally OK with it - bilingual children can easily handle things like that and they don’t get confused. Everything else is bilingual in their lives so, from the children I have seen, they just accept that their names are as well.
