How To Choose the Perfect Name for Your International Child

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“We didn’t worry at all about if people will be able to pronounce our daughter’s long name”

Says Divan, a dad of one. "Actually, there is a guy we met when we moved to Beijing. His name is Gregory and we asked him if he introduces himself as Greg cause it’s easier to pronounce. But he said no, he wanted to be called by his full name. That always stuck with me.”

Choosing your baby’s name is never a simple task. There’s so much to consider when picking the perfect name for your child: family traditions, potential nicknames, siblings’ names, initials, meanings, how well it fits your last name, and the list goes on.

It gets even more complicated for people living on foreign ground. As expats, we are influenced by (at least) two cultures. So how do we honor our homeland, our host city, and the culturally diverse community Beijing has made us a part of when choosing a name for our baby? Do we err on the side of caution and keep it short and simple to improve our chances of pronunciation success, or do we go with a hard-to-pronounce baby name and not mind it being butchered each time we try to make a doctor’s appointment?

There’s no way to fully avoid the cross-cultural headache that foreign names of expat kids will most likely cause. Living in China and naming your child anything other than Peter or Amy often do not mix well, so we wanted to find out what Beijing parents have to say about this topic. What made them choose their child's name, and do they think they made the right choice?

I’ve never been very traditional with anything, and naming my kids was no exception. Both of them were born in Beijing, one pre- and the other post-Covid ( well, not really "post-" because it seems we’ll never get to the "post-" part), and both times I knew we were not going to take the traditional route.

We’d been living in Beijing for so long, and made so many friends from different parts of the world, that it only made sense we would want them to be able to pronounce our children’s names. But let’s be clear. We didn’t choose their names so their preschool teachers, friends’ parents, or distant cousins could pronounce them easily. We chose their names because we thought they were perfect for them.

The first time, with Noa, we had it all figured out – we were going to go with an international name with a traditional spelling, in this way keeping the connection to our country of origin. Things got a bit more complicated the second time around with Noel, but we finally got to the point where we narrowed it down to two names. But I was so indecisive that I told my husband we should wait until the baby is born to pick the name. And that’s exactly what we did.

Now we have two perfect children with two perfect names.

Because that’s the only thing that matters: The names we choose for our children have to suit us, not anyone else.

So how did Beijing’s littlest get their names?

For expat dad David and his family, the administrative headache factor cannot be disregarded.

“Too many letters in my last name for the hospital computer. Used my wife’s three-letter Chinese family name instead.”

“[The Beijing Family Hospital] computer handled my husband’s long last name fine," said Lisa Hwang. "Also, we thought at the time the birth certificate and passport names needed to match. We did finally decided to give up on any middle names because we already totaled 21 letters with our son’s first and last name together. It has proven helpful now with [the] daily community Covid testing manual passport input process," she explains. "We now walk in with a printed paper with our details [in] large fonts.”

While for some it’s a practical decision, for some parents the name they choose needs to reflect their faith and religious identity.

"When we learned that we were pregnant, we knew it from the very start that if a boy, we would name him Jibreel, the angel of revelation

Says Crestie Ilagan, a Filipino mom raising a multicultural child. "In Arabic, Jibreel means ‘God is my strength.’ Our son is a daily reminder of God’s love for both of us. He is our miracle.”

For some others the choice was affected by different factors. For instance, Anja Nesovic, a mom of two, had different concerns about naming her children: “My first one was born in 2017 and my husband and I settled on her name pretty quickly. Our son was born two years later and it was quite a process, picking out a name for him. I’d say that living here had definitely had a big impact on our decision. We wanted traditional names that can be easily pronounced by Chinese people, and I think we found the perfect ones. I think that living here made us not even consider names that we would have normally considered, living back home. There are a few sounds in our language that sound very funny when pronounced by non-natives so we decided not to go with names that contain these sounds. We didn’t want our kids’ names mangled.”

Alison Lemos says that, since his wife’s and his name have the same initial letter, they wanted their kids’ names to start with the same letter, too. However, it wasn’t an easy ride for them.

"We always agreed on the first letter of our children’s names," he said. "But we argued both times about the actual names, even more the second time. There was one name that I liked because it means happiness and good luck in my language, but has a completely opposite meaning in hers – it means ‘widow.’ So in the end, we went with a name that is uncommon in both countries.”

How about you? How did you pick your child’s name? Tell us in the comments below!

Images: Pexels

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