Pronouncing a name in someone’s own language

[Brightun]

There’s an issue in my team. One member’s name is the same spelling as an English name but the pronunciation in their language is markedly different. Some team members are struggling with this and say they feel stupid/pretentious putting on an accent to say the name. I think they should make the effort and get over it. They are refusing. Team member is saying they feel discriminated. Who is BU?

The final five words of your post are the only relevant point of anything being discussed by anyone on this thread.

You pronounce it as it is supposed to be pronounced unless you are physically incapable of making that sound. I live abroad and I will correct people every single time they pronounce my name wrong (it is an easy name to say).

I have one of those names and in the UK I go by the British pronunciation. But that was by choice 20 odd years ago, as I back then was so desperate to fit in. However, the que should come from the person whose name it is. I used to work in a company with many of my team members from India. We ALWAYS made sure we pronounced their names correctly and discreetly corrected eachother if we got it wrong. It is a respect thing. Just pay attention and get it right.

I think it's absolutely fine if people struggle to roll their Rs or find it difficult to say particular sounds. I lived abroad for years and got used to my first name being mangled because it begins with a letter that people from that country typically can't say.

That's very different in my view from simply refusing to try. Most people understand that it can be hard to mimic the sounds of another language perfectly, but people can at least have a go.

It depends on the name. I try to use the pronunciation they use.
If you can't say the name as the person says it, it can be worse than calling them something different.

It's not asking too much that people call you say, Dav-eed not David, but you're stuffed if you have a name like Geertjan.

This is not about accent...
The team are being twats unless the name is virtually inpronouncable due to really hard combination of sounds atypical to their native ones(yes it happens).
This sounds like they just can't be arsed.

I am curious to know what type of name is it purely so I know how much to judge them.

French=marry, English is Mar-ee
Yup Marie in mine is pronounced Marry-ye (marɪjɛ). If that makes sense. Different but not that hard and no need for some mock accent

I have an Eastern European surname that’s short and easy to say, two syllables that don’t use letter combinations that are difficulties for British people. When written in the Latin alphabet it’s also easy to read, say it as you see it.

I find it bizarre how people just refuse to say it half the time. They anglicise it to random familiar words or just rename me. An example of how easy it is would be something like ‘Rev-so’, not my name but gives you an idea. People would then say, ‘oh, I’ll say Rita!’. Even writen down, six letters, they write a new word. Intelligent people with good spelling skills. You’ll say no, that’s a v… and they’ll dead eye you.

Honestly, just listen..then repeat. Double check if unsure.
Just don’t do that weird thing where you obviously glaze over as the person says their name. You can see when people do it. They mentally go ‘no, I am not learning this’ and the blank look goes on their face then they claim they can’t.

Exactly. It just has to be phonetically correct in English for the way it is pronounced in the language for which the name originates.
I don't get why its thought to be "pretentious" to pronounce something correctly?

Your team needs to get over themselves, how fucking rude are they?

Calling someone by their given name is not pretentious no matter how unfamiliar it is to the speaker.

I'm pretty good at pronouncing names I'm not familiar with but if I've struggled and asked for help I've never met anyone who was offended, in fact they're usually embarrassingly grateful which is a pretty shameful reflection on British work culture.

That team member needs to be reported to HR for some basic politeness training, to find the manners to override their innate xenophobia.

Nobody needs to adopt an accent to say Lom Bear instead of Lambert

I think it is discrimination. Persistent refusal to me is a disciplinary matter, it is low level racism.

I have a very difficult name. Pretty much all my colleagues (bar one) struggle to pronounce it. However, they all make an effort and I appreciate that. I'd find it really rude if they would just decide unilaterally to call me something else.

Yes but Tarn-ya/Tan-ya and Alex-arn-der/Alex-an-der is not markedly different is it? They are being asked to do an approximation of it as best as they could and not do it with bells and whistles and all the full pronunciation (most people with foreign names understand this.

This is similar to Sara/Sarah - can be said Suhhh-ruh or Sae-ruh. Or the laura example given earlier. This is not an issue of accent/dialects (which the Tarn-ya example is of), but an issue of different pronunciation. If it was me I would be reporting to HR around discrimination. Are you the manager? If so you need to sort it.

I don’t know any French Hugos who expect Brits to drop the H but it wouldn’t be hard to say Ugo if somebody insisted. However, it still wouldn’t sound like the French pronunciation. I think it depends what the exact issue is.

I bet that the foreign name person is managing to pronounce all the English names ok... Even if with non english accent....

It’s not a case of sounds that don’t exist in British English, just a consonant that works differently in that language and a vowel sounds being changed. Not a mouthful at all.

I’ve recently taken over the team and this is the least of their problems eugh

It's not about accent, it's the person's name. It's the same with spelling - would your colleagues continue to spell the person's name in, say, an Anglicised way rather than the French way? So Mary instead of Marie? To do so once corrected would be a bit rude and I feel the same goes for pronunciation.

I've never met anyone called Alex and er instead of Alex ahn der but if that's how they say their name, that's how I would pronounce it.

It's very rude, could well be racist and I would refer the matter to HR. Tell them that they have try to say it correctly or else!

I think it really depends on the name and whether this is an accent or pronunciation issue.

My husband and son have a French last name that people here in the UK really cannot say properly, they don't expect people to, they just go with the anglicised version. When we lived abroad no one could say my English name correctly, it never bothered me.

But if the change is rather easy and people are just being lazy, that's not on.

On the 'welsh names that work in england' type threads, Geraint is usuallyy suggested, yet the cyclist Mr Thomas, got his first name said as all sorts, but never Geraint unless it was said by a Welsh speaker. I've heard it said as Juh-raint, Jerrunt, Gerr-ant. G'rant, even Gerr-ighnt, but not GERR-ighnt.

Some people have no ear for sounds in other languages. I worked with a Khalid and he got called Kal-eed, Hal-eed, Karleed etc

If you were discussing someone like Richard Wagner or Imran Khan, how would you say their names?

@MumEeeee I have a colleague who has the same issue.

Her name is not a collection of letters we see often, if at all. But her name badge is clear, emails, website, all communications are easy to read simple. Like yours it is 2 syllable, 6 letters said exactly as spelt out.

Hevrin

Hev Rin

And we have a few clients who balk at it. Not only do they stop and make a fuss they too make up their own version, say crappy things like "oh that's too difficult to remember"

As we are self employed we choose to laugh, mangle their names and often find ourselves too busy to accommodate their requests.

I have little patience for that dismissive firm of rudeness. Especially when one of them is Bhode (BO Dee) spelled in that idiosyncratic way. Too rude.

I had a work colleague called Claudia, pronounced the German way because she was German. I wouldn't have dreamt of calling her the English version because that wasn't her name.

I've worked with a Sara who pronounced it like Sarah, and at the same time with a Sara who pronounced it the usual way. Again, not hard to remember which was which and to get it right. It's not about putting on an accent, it's about saying their colleague's name as accurately as they can. Would they call a French man named Jean, like the English woman's name, or would they pronounce it correctly??

Speaking for the "northern English" they wouldn't need to ask us because we are not so ignorant as to ignore completely a request to pronounce someones name correctly when there is no verbalised reason not to do so. And where the hell did they get "r"s in Alexander and Tanya?

If they are incapable of pronouncing specific sounds in a foreign word, then that's one thing. If they are refusing because they are ignorant, then they'd be heading for a disciplinary. It isn't just rude - it is deliberately offensive. And that is something we would not tolerate.

Completely depends on the name and the exact pronunciation issue.

It does kind of depend on the name and pronunciation. Especially if your colleagues feel it’s similar to the different pronunciation of Tanya in English accents. Is the truth somewhere in the middle?

I have a name that Americans tend to pronounce differently from British people. I don’t correct my American colleagues because they aren’t wilfully mispronouncing my name. They objectively are mispronouncing it. But they aren’t aware of it and they don’t mean it. I can see that they’d have to speak oddly to pronounce it properly.