To use a 'foreign' name for DC?

[TrueBlu]

There has been some debate in recent months about names you can/can't use on baby names.

So my question is, is it ur to use a name when you have no connection to its country of origin. Would you be appropriating the culture it came from?

Also, when is it 'okay' to Anglicise names?

E.g. I could use Connor instead of Conchobhar, or Neve instead of Niamh, but not Zanthe instead of Xanthe or Eefa instead of Aoife.

I know an irish family with the name spelt "Sorcha" :) Lovely name.

Its a really personal thing - I loved Sepp for a boy (local shortening of Joseph) when pregnant with DC3, but because we are not local DH said people would think we were trying too hard to pretend to be something we aren't (i.e. from this region)! I actually think we would have got away with it if we lived in the UK though...

We gave our dc1 a foreign spelling of a common name in the UK as that's how it would be spelled in the country DH is from. It had 1 extra letter - you can't believe the confusion it caused in the UK. If we'd stayed there I think dc1 might have used the British spelling but we moved to DH's country & there's no confusion here. But we still get Christmas cards from the UK with the wrong spelling despite dc1 being a teenager now.

Sorcha is an entirely different name than Saoirse.
Op, go for an Irish (or French, German, whatever) name if you like. But for the love of God spell it correctly. Otherwise it's like spelling Andrew as Anndru.

Lucky escape Schwab, because that's a name that only means one person now and when they finally put him on trial it'll drag on for years.

You can call your child anything you like, but spare a thought for the child as a grown up having to spell out his/her name all the time.

We live abroad so we were careful to choose names that "work" in both cultures. That ruled out for example Nicholas and Lucas which are pronounced as Nichola and Luca here, or Noa/Noah which is a girl's name here.

Even so, we got it a bit wrong as DS has been saddled with a double t where the local spelling would be a single t. He is very attached to his extra t, but less attached to having to correct the spelling of his name all the time.

DD has a Welsh middle name, Rhiannon (my family are Welsh). She absolutely HATES it and won't tell any of her friends what it is.

I did like Sorcha, until I was told it's pronounced Sor-a-ka.

I wish people would nc on threads like these, so they can tell us what the names actually are

DaphneWhitethigh I had to think who you might mean... the FIFA guy? Not into football at all (unless its my own kids playing in the local U11 league :o )

I like Tara, but wouldn't spell it Teamhair, which is the correct way.

Well, I don't mind giving names. DS's name is Matthias, which we pronounce in the German/ continental way.

The local spelling is Mathias, and unfortunately since he was born it has gone from being a very unusual name to a very common one.

So now, literally everyone spells DS's name wrong, including on official papers, which can be a massive hassle.

This is why I like having (strong links to) three countries gonna have so much fun naming any future kids!

My dad is from a northern European country and has anglicised his name a lot in England, for pronunciation reasons - he doesn't care, no one cares. I can't actually pronounce one of my middle names properly unless I anglicise it - can't roll my Rs.
I'm used to mine being pronounced three different ways depending on whether it's a relative from either country 1 or 2 or someone in England. The English one is not the right pronunciation but the UK is where I've lived for the vast majority of my life. Used to piss me off as a child but couldn't give a shit now. It's kind of fun too having parents who pronounce it differently from a given moment to the next, depending on language/situation etc

redexpat fascinating about Denmark, but I would find that so hard! like a uniform

But I think Tara is one of those names that, like Conor, is now common enough to have an independent existence as a name in its own right...

Call your children what you like as long as it suits them and you are happy with it although be prepared to start a "trend" if it's a bit unusual and very nice (if I say so myself), as has happened to us!

OP, it can be a hassle. A real hassle.

But definitely spell names correctly if there is no standard Anglo way - Aoife doesn't map onto Eefe in my English accent at all.

I agree with the PP who said that you will have to be OK with constantly explaining to people that, no, you do not have any connection to that culture. Personally that would bother me, but you may not feel that way.

(As a side note, DH is Greek, I'm Scandinavian, and we live in the UK, so our children's names have to sound OK in three very different languages. In addition to this, Greeks often change names into the Greek version by default. I like the name Karl if we have a boy, but in Greece that turns into the abomination 'Karolos', which is just horrible.)

I know a girl named Ceilidh on her birth certificate because of Scottish connections. Those connections weren't strong enough for them to know how it's pronounced though so she's gone by 'Keely' all her life. Even spelled like that.

I know an irish family with the name spelt "Sorcha" smile Lovely name.

Sorcha is my favourite girls name. It's the Irish for Sarah and is pronounced Sir Ka

My kids were born in Russia (we adopted them). They both still have their first names, we didn't change them. My DD's is pretty ordinary but my son's is a bit exotic, (Andrey) He often get's called Andrew.
I have a fairly exotic name too and I love it now, but I hated it growing up as no one could spell it.

I'm Irish and have taught so many Aoifes Aoibheanns, Fiadhs and Tadhgs that I gave my daughter a very popular top ten English name , very rare here.
Get lots of questions on the origin of the name so it works both ways!

YANBU. IMO foreign names are fine. The U.K. Is home to people from so many places, However foreign the name, someone will know it. And who knows what your connections might be to the country your chosen names come from? My oldest has an English name, but one which is common to other cultures. My middle child has a foreign name that is 3 letters, sounds the same as it is spelt but still gets mispronounced. We picked the name as we liked it, and only found out much much later that it was the name of a long deceased relative (died around 100 years ago, my dad only found out when visiting his grand mother's grave, this relative was buried near by and the name was on the head stone. No one had realised as the name was different from his every day name and was written in Hebrew, which my dad can read, but my grandma [dad's DM] cannot). The baby has a foreign name which, in order to spell it the way it sounds in that language, requires an apostrophe. So we spell it without, and pronounce it the way we spell it, IE it is very much Anglicised . No one has questioned that, including our friends who come from that foreign country. I can't really put the names here as they're quite distinctive!

My little Abishag gets lots of sniggering, yet it's completely phonetic!

Did you really call your dd Abishag?

DH quite liked Bathsheba for our DD, but we didn't pick it.

I gave my dd a name with a slightly awkward spelling, though I thought it was a perfectly normal and well known name (it was in the top 30 for girls' baby names that year). It still gets misspelled almost every time someone new has to use it, and she's starting to get annoyed by it now (she's 7).

There's no way I'd give an unusual name that wasn't figured out easily and phonetically.

Punx is it Isobel? or maybe Isabel? Isabelle?

Ceilidh isn't a name, even when it's pronounced correctly! That's like calling a child "Disco"!