Laura Romig, Language Ambassador, Class of 2025
We all have them. We use them with every single person in our lives. We tell the stories behind them, we learn to pronounce them, we struggle to remember them. And yet, we often forget names are a part of language. In a previous article, I wrote about how the names we use to refer to places and languages themselves are subject to geopolitical and linguistic questions of identity and justice. But what about human names? When thinking about language in an academic context, we sometimes see names as unchanging tokens that float outside the context of language, just neutral symbols. But in a multilingual culture, and even just in a multilingual and multicultural campus like Brown, names are far from neutral. They are wrapped up in the interaction between different languages and the acceptance of cultures within linguistic hegemony. Names, and how they are used, perceived, and manipulated, can carry the weight of entire languages behind them.
Of course, students growing up with names not normalized or recognized in the place where they live already grow up understanding a name is not a neutral thing. These students might have an acute awareness of names as language—and the discomfort that comes with a mismatch of name to a hegemonic linguistic culture. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novelist and writer, wrote for the New York Times about his choice to keep his given name, which is Vietnamese, rather than assimilate to an American name as his parents did. That he had to consider changing his name at all—and that people kept presenting him the idea—demonstrates the non-neutrality of names, how they are as wrapped up in language as any other word. Nguyen writes: "That, in the end, was the choice I made. Not to change. Not to translate. Not, in this one instance, to adapt to America". His refusal to translate himself rebukes the nebulous idea of a proper "American name," one that would easily disappear into a string of English text and refuse to challenge America to understand itself as multicultural. The "American name", much like the "mythical English reader" I discussed last week, is a cultural concept that continue to exert power over our daily lives and use of language, despite its lack of basis in reality.
Viet Thanh Nguyen's situation is even more complicated by the fact that, as a writer, he is building a career tied to his name. A few weeks ago, Sciencepublished an article about how "scientists with East Asian or African names are less likely to be mentioned or quoted in stories that reference their work". Even when scientists have done crucial work contributing to scientific results, a factor like the spelling or pronunciation of their name might limit their potential. Stories about science promote the work for further applications and research, lead to field and industry recognition, and help advance the career of contributing scientists. One of the reasons mentioned in the article is tied to linguistic ability, as well: journalists and publicists might be less likely to interview scientists whose names they don't recognize or can't pronounce, or who they think (or know) might have limited English. Writers and scientists both use their names for recognition of their work and for continued accolades and material support. If certain names are treated differently, whether subconsciously or consciously, by publicity, academia, or any other institutions, then entire groups of scientists and writers (and more) are disadvantaged. And this disparity only incentivizes the opposite of what Viet Thanh Nguyen chose to do: assimilation and acceptance of a different name, one that will lead to more interviews, headline mentions, Instagram captions, and more.
In a multilingual culture, the hierarchization of certain languages also haunts the exchange and perpetuation of names, as it happens in marriage and other forms of legal and informal connection between individuals. If it is becoming more and more acceptable for spouses to keep their own names or to take either partner's name, rather than defaulting to the male partner (if there is one), the process of exchanging names at marriage then becomes an open question. If one partner has a name from the hegemonic language, and the other has a name from a language disadvantaged in that society, how should they negotiate exchanging names, or name their children? According to that study in Science, the former might explicitly provide the family or the child with material benefits in at least one field, and potentially others. But, of course, choosing the "more common name" for this reason not only accepts the unfairness of this trend but also perpetuates it, not to mention erases and devalues the latter name and the culture and language its connected to.
All of these examples from the professional and relational world are useful to understand how a name takes on the weight of an entire language. But what does this mean in a language learning context? First of all, learning certain languages, such as languages that have a different alphabet than the one your name is originally in, helps make students more aware of names as part of languages. Students in the Mandarin Chinese program at Brown will know this; they probably know their classmates only by their Chinese names, which use Chinese characters, and not even their given names. On the other hand, teachers and students have rightly criticized the practice of assigning "Spanish names" or names from other languages to students in the classroom, as both an instance cultural appropriation, and as simply unrealistic: a student who goes to live in Perú won't adopt a "Spanish name" in place of their given one. What does this mean for a language like Mandarin, which doesn't use the same (approximately) shared Latin alphabet of Spanish and English? Does the situation change based on the fact that Mandarin has a long history of transliterating Latin-alphabet names into Chinese characters? I don't quite know the answer.
At the same time as we don't necessarily need to assign entirely new names to students learning Spanish, it's still important that students learning a new language have exposure to the sounds, spelling, connotations, and other crucial factors relating to names. Here's a seemingly silly example: "Karen" is a name that in English now has a certain set of cultural connotations. If a student learning English doesn't understand these connotations, she's technically missing out on a part of the English language, even if as a name it seems more detached from the bulk of vocabulary learning. Actually, we could even argue that understanding names and their cultural function is more essential than any other type of vocabulary; names are terms that refer to people, not inanimate things or ideas, and people are the heart of any language.
There's another reason why language learning students gain from exposure to names commonly used in the language they are studying. Reading both Nguyen's piece and the article in Science, it's clear that recognition plays a crucial role in how names are perceived, appreciated, and accepted by a linguistic culture. When a name is recognized, it starts to slip naturally into the language, until its perceived linguistic distance vanishes almost entirely—just like words borrowed from other languages that have become normalized in English. And in the opposite direction, the normalization of the name and its pronunciation also brings the entire language and culture where the name originated from closer to the hegemonic language.
When you read a dense fantasy or sci-fi book with names made-up by the author, you are reading fragments of an entire world and culture which is almost definitely new to you, since it doesn't exist. You've probably struggled over how to pronounce the main character's name, and sounded it out in your head. And as you're reading on, your eyes might start to skim over the unfamiliar place and people names, without even trying to pronounce them. Names from languages other than the hegemonic language often receive this kind of treatment: either categorically ignored, or even materially disadvantaged or harmed—all because of a lack of recognition. As language learning students in a multilingual culture, then, familiarizing ourselves with the names that occupy a language and attach to its speakers is one step we can take to grow the recognition of and equity for all names, no matter which language they come from.