Is this a logical reason to change a baby’s name?

So many responses are “don’t change it if YOU love it”. Who gives a flying fuck what the parents who don’t have to deal with the bullshit of having a crap name love? It’s the poor kid who has to live with it. Will it cause her endless hassle and having to explain how her name is said? If yes, change it.

It’s like the narcissist celebrities with lovely traditional names who saddle their kids with the most awful names. Eg Katie (Katrina) who calls her children Princess and Bunny. Or Anne-Marie with Forever Sugar.

I would have thought that everyone can pronounce Phoebe after years of Friends! Many years ago I heard someone say Her-mee-onee for Hermione, after the HP films I would expect it to be pronounced correctly. Teaching abroad I found having a girl called Marie Jesus in a class to be challenging.

I speak fluent Spanish, and I struggle with saying chorizo in English... "if I say "cho-ree-tho", will people think I'm a twat?" Cho-ree-so is equally valid, that's how they say it in some parts of Spain. But I'm not doing the Spanish rolled "r" - then I really would be a twat, no two ways about it. But in that case, why do the Spanish "z"...if I'm not doing the Spanish "r"? I have been known to just say "choritzo" just to avoid looking pretentious... at some point the word will become fully absorbed into the English language, and be absorbed into the English phonemic system, Spanish students learning English will be taught "choritzo is how you say chorizo in English", just like "speederrr-man" is how you say "spiderman" in French.

Good response for when you’re wrong.

Find better reading material.

Or "we've noticed that people are avoiding using Lleucu's name. We know it's unfamiliar to lots of you but we really love it and the meaning so if in doubt just remember it rhymes with "wakey" as in "wakey wakey Lleucu" and it's like Lake-eee but with the LL sound at the front. It's really important to us that she has a connection to our Welsh culture and identity and her beautiful name is part of that"
It doesn't rhyme with wakey, and poor little Lleucu will probably get called Thlakey, Hlakey, Clakey or something equally hideous.
In desperation, she'll probably end up saying 'Lucy'.

How come the Daily Mail manage to call the Spanish King Felipe on its gossip pages rather than Philip but the Spanish equivalent rag feels it has to use Carlos and Guillermo?

You and DH obviously loved the name enough to bestow it upon DD.

Rather than abandon it to appease others or through fear, stand by your choice and educate others unsure of how to pronounce it.

These days I imagine a good number of DC will have difficult first or last names to pronounce.

My kids have Welsh names that people outside of Wales are unfamiliar with but once they're told they get it close enough. We're used to the misspellings and I totally get what you mean about identity, the names often create questions around meaning, where's the name from etc.

If it's a really long name I can kind of get the lack of confidence from people. It's odd that family haven't got it. I think you've got two choices - double down but give people a bit of info to help grow their confidence in the pronunciation. I pronounce my own name slightly differently if I'm speaking Welsh or English because of my accent. Can I suggest you do a little voice note or video for whatsapp family group chats "hey, we know some of you are struggling a bit with Ceridwen's name, it's ce-rid-wen with the emphasis on the second syllable. If you want to shorten it we've been calling her Weni, so wen-ee, it's a really important name to us because it means.... thanks so much, lots of love from Ceridwen and us".

Or "we've noticed that people are avoiding using Lleucu's name. We know it's unfamiliar to lots of you but we really love it and the meaning so if in doubt just remember it rhymes with "wakey" as in "wakey wakey Lleucu" and it's like Lake-eee but with the LL sound at the front. It's really important to us that she has a connection to our Welsh culture and identity and her beautiful name is part of that"

That kind of thing.

The more people who use the name, the more familiar it will become. My kids have had mates with all sorts of names. My youngest was saying yesterday that he only knows of 5 people with his name so they should make an exclusive club together (includes a guy who works at a local gallery, his sister's mate's brother, some guy off a Welsh tv show etc).

Or you change the name, which I think would be a huge shame.

Many people definitely struggle with it.
I’ve heard a myriad of different pronunciations, chor-EYE-so was a memorable one.

So many people are saying “don’t change the name, use a nickname”. You are in fact suggesting the name is changed but just not on official documents. That can cause even more headache than just officially changing the name.

We live in a multicultural society anyone who says they can’t pronounce the name just can’t be bothered.

That’s not actually true though @Onmytod24. It’s often very difficult or even impossible for adults to correctly reproduce sounds that aren’t found in their own language.

Yes, and even if you say Szczepan they will say Sheppan or Steffan or 'I'll call you Steve'.

And it will be nearly every day of your life, and if you say, 'Szczepan' again they'll roll their eyes or tell you you're wrong.

Why do you think the vast majority of English people will cheerfully go to Pwllheli on holiday, but not have the faintest idea how to say the name - even if somebody carefully, slowly and repeatedly models it for them? And that's not even a foreign place or language.

Yes, I think this is obvious - surely? Your name is going to be said many times a day by the people in your own culture/town/area, so why would you actively choose a name that many people there will struggle with or find comical or unfortunate in the local language/culture? If you find a particular name quirky, amusing or endearing for whatever reason and are determined to use it, get yourself a hamster.

I actually think it's a nasty and selfish thing to do, to deliberately deny your child the basic right to have people confidently using their name and then, every time they meet or speak to a new person, being greeted with "Hello.......... errrm, errrr, I'm sorry, I don't know how to say your name", when it could have been "Good morning, Laura - it's great to meet you".

If you liked ethereal 'nature names' and decided to call your child Mist or Misty, that would be quirky but totally fine and generally positive in an English-speaking environment; but if you'd moved to a German-speaking country and were settled there for the long haul, I certainly wouldn't recommend it! I would say the same to an Indian couple who had settled in the UK and who wanted to name their baby boy Dikshit.

It's very different if you choose to move somewhere different as an adult: you can know you will either be constantly correcting pronunciation, accept people calling you a local version/approximation of it or adopt a local name instead - whichever you prefer.

The trouble is, it's not just friends, family and colleagues that have to say it. It's people who you'll only encounter once and then never see again. My husband (who I mentioned in a comment above, who switched to using his middle name rather than his foreign first name) got sick of explaining his name to complete strangers he might not ever see again (the receptionist at the hospital, the bloke at Halford's, your friend's mum's neighbour, every single call centre operative every time you have to ring up a helpline about anything at all...).

They don't struggle with it. They've heard it said as choritzo so often they don't know that it's not right. Same with piella, expresso, lartay, taggytelly and brushetta.

My cousin is 23 she still gets called baby or the baby cos she’s the youngest cousin. My friends son couldn’t say her little girls name so called her sissy and we all her that - they are teenager now.

I don’t think changing her name is the way to go. I would either just use it a lot around people so they know how to pronounce it or use a nickname

Is it a name that contains sounds that don’t really exist in English? Eg so many people whose first/only language is English struggle with the word ‘ chorizo’.

If you love the name just teach your friends and family how to say it correctly and ask them to please use it instead of avoiding it.

To be fair, it's not just a British thing at all. Most people struggle to pronounce names they're not used to, all over the world. When I lived in Spain, half my British friends just got referred to by the Spanish versions of their English names, if one existed - people didn't even bother trying half the time! (Charlotte>Carlota, Hanna>Ana, Joanne > Juana).

@Greengage1983 , hear, hear. I suspect that @BoredZelda has no idea about the different sounds in Arabic.

MANY people ... with any mother tongue, find it tricky to pronounce sounds in other languages that don't exist in their own mother tongue, unless they have had a lot of exposure to that language from a young age, have worked really hard as an adult, or have a naturally very good ear.
Absolutely this.

No hun that’s not how it works. Certain letters in other languages, are never going to be pronounced effectively or effortlessly as a native speaker especially those which letters are rolled or come from the back of the throat-none of which we have in the English language. I have a broad northern accent, not a delicate soft Arabic one. I was tired of them focusing on how I was pronouncing it when I was trying, not that I was showing up and helping how ever I could. So I just gave her a nickname instead so it wasn’t a source of contention. OP others have already said this and this is why.

Does it have a rolled R in it? It’s the only Spanish sound that is hard for English speakers to pronounce. I had a friend called Reyes and the R is often lightly rolled, so Brits were scared to give it a go.

Names like Luz should be fine - there are no sounds in there that are difficult for an EFL to pronounce. You just need to know that Z = “th” and you’re good to go.

Oh, come on. I speak two foreign languages fluently, and I have taught those languages to British people as well as teaching TEFL to foreign language speakers, and I can tell you that MANY people (I would go as far as to say most adults), all over the world, with any mother tongue, find it tricky to pronounce sounds in other languages that don't exist in their own mother tongue, unless they have had a lot of exposure to that language from a young age, have worked really hard as an adult, or have a naturally very good ear. People struggle to even hear certain sounds, if they do no exist as phonemes in their own language. As an example, most English people struggle to hear the difference between the vowel sounds in the French words "cul" and "cou" (we just hear them both as "coo"); or "quand" and "con". Meanwhile, native French and Spanish speakers often struggle with "deep" vs "dip", the vowel sound in the English "cup", and Spanish people struggle to differentiate between a j and y sound in English.

If you were blessed with a very good ear for sounds, it might do to be a bit more magnanimous about it, it is a genuine struggle for a lot of people and not just British people, and not necessarily just because they're not trying.

My husband has a non English name, or you know, one not traditionally used in England by native English speakers, I really struggle to pronounce it, I have to really think about it and still get it wrong and it's obvious I am struggling and concentrating, mostly it's around not being able to roll my R's naturally, though I am getting better, after 20 years!

I call him by his proper name pronouncing it wrong when he annoys me, or 90% of the time he gets a nickname, which thankfully he loves and prefers me using.

So, if it really is a name her English relatives will always struggle with despite explanation and teaching, they almost certainly will end up giving her a nickname or her friends may well do. So it is up to you if you are happy with that. Depends how much you love the name and how much you are wiling to put up with. Is there an anglicised version of it?