To continue calling DD by the name I gave her

[bannsise]

My DD is 22, her first name is Isabella, I chose the name as I love it and think it’s very pretty. Since she was little I’d always call her Isabella or Bella, her dad who I wasn’t with called her “Isa” (ee-sa).
As a teen she insisted I didn’t call her Bella, I happily just used Isabella.
Now she is insisting I call her Isa, she says she doesn’t like Isabella, no one apart from me has called her it in 10+ years. She also complains I say it wrong anyway (her dad is European and pronounces it ee-sa-bell-a, I say is-a-bell-a). I replied that I can’t say her name wrong as I picked it!!

AIBU to say I will continue to call her Isabella (with the English pronunciation) and not by Isa as that isn’t the name I chose for her and I don’t like it.

This.

At 18 I chose a different dominutive of my name as I always hated the one everyone used.

She is who she wants to be - as an adult she has made a choice and it is insulting to tell her that you don't respect it.

OP you’ll probably have to put up with it to keep the peace. Your daughter really is being quite unreasonable. How very boring for you.
Guess there’s deeper relationship issues going on between the two of you?

She's very young, and hopefully the name obsession will subside with maturity and some more experience of non-Italians with different accents to her.

She's 22. She's an adult that knows what she wants and for her mother to respect her decisions. Also, she lived in France for years, so she knows about different accents!

I guess if the OP is ‘bored’ by her unreasonable daughter she can just stop bothering to have a relationship with her?

OP kindly it does not sound like you have the closest relationship with your daughter. She has respectfully asked you to call her a certain name. She is an adult and quite entitled to make that choice.

You are coming across as quite controlling about this and seems to be focusing your resentment about her father on your daughter's choice of name.

As she was raised in Italy, she won’t have had any UK friends or teachers. Her mum is actually the odd one out here. The lass lives in and grew up in Italy, is Italian, and it isn’t strange that she wants the ‘correct’ (to her) pronunciation used.

generally i think call people the name/version of their name they prefer
but
I don't know if this has been pointed out but 'Isa' with the pronunciation she prefers is an Islamic name for a boy, specifically its the name used for Jesus

so she may want to consider that

would Izzy be acceptable to her as that's a common abbreviation for Isabel?

It's not your name op , because you choose it
It's her name
I actually changed my first name ,and the only person who wouldn't accept it was my mum .
She made a right song and dance about it ,and continued to call me my old name ,
It became very difficult when I had children with her calling me one name ,and the rest of the world calling me another .
Stupidly stupidly I changed my name back to the name she wanted , because I was worried it would confuse my children .
I made such a mess with passport, driving licence,degree certificates mortgage documents, marriage certificates birth certificates .
I thought she was going to have a big part in my children's lives ,so it was worth it ..
I was my new name for about 7 years and it was really hard personally going back to my old name ,andi still don't always react if someone calls me ..I'm like oh ,do you mean me .
Anyway it just fizzled out with my mum ,she wasn't involved with my kids ,she wasn't interested in them ,and I'm left with a name I feel no connection to and I wish I'd stood up to her in hindsight

If she doesn't identify as British and grew up in Italy all her life, the Italian pronunciation is going to feel far more natural.

You can carry on calling her Isa-bel but it's going to be like a splinter under her fingernail and it's going to leave a permanent slight grudge - she's still establishing her identity and you not respecting one of the signs of that won't be forgotten, though it might be forgiven.

It's not worth it, @bannsise It might grate for you, but respect her choice at this point. When she's 38 you can laugh about it together.

It's her name, her choice.

This....also keeping or ending the relationship may not be the decision of the OP!

Probably more than a "slight" grudge

I think YABU to give your daughter, who was raised in Italy, an Italian name and then refuse to use the Italian pronunciation.

You are being very unreasonable!

I was born Kathryn, and everyone who reads it aloud pronounces it Kath-rin, rather than Kath-er-in like they would if it were spelled Katherine or Catherine. I HATE the pronunciation without the middle E sound.
My chosen name is to go by Katie, it has been for the past 25 years, its what i sign birthday/christmas cards from, have as my social media name, sign off emails with etc. Despite this, my entire extended family called me (I'm NC with everyone but my dad and sister for the past 8 years) Kathy. (my late paternal grandmother would even spell it Cathy) I despise how Kathy sounds, its the worst shortening variation of my name in my opinion. It was even more hypocritical as they had their own name gripes, my paternal gran went by a shortening, my maternal gran went by her middle not first name, one aunt wanting the shortening and spelling Jacky instead of Jacqueline or Jackie, and other aunt was Linda not wanting her name shortened to Lin. I respected their name choices, but they never respected mine. It still angers me when i've had no contact with them all this time, if it were my own father insisting on calling me Kathy, i'd be very upset, and feel completely disrespected. Resentment would grow every time he used his choice over my choice.

This would be a very silly hill to die on, do you want to estrange yourself from your child and have her limit contact with you, over something as small as a slight pronounciation change for you, but that's mightily important to her as her whole identity? She's not asking you to call her a completely different female name, a male name, to call her he/him/son etc.
It is also massively relevant that this is the pronounciation her father and fathers family (and general public if thats the common pronounciation in her country of residence) has used her entire life, to her it is as much her "correct" name as the way you feel is the correct way. (It sounds like you chose her name without her fathers input, so the one way of "correct" pronounciation wasn't agreed upon from birth)
At the end of the day, it is HER name, not yours, and it is her sense of self identity you're trying to knock down and replace with your version, telling her "I'm right you're wrong, because i'm your mother" and in my opinion, that just isn't your right to decide.

Make this a hill you will die on and you may not have many opportunities to call her anything

Plenty of parents call their adult children their birth name, whilst their children are known to others by something else.
Deeper issue is the lack of acceptance and respect for each other, and probably on both sides. That’s a shame.

This is about so much more than the name then, it's about your daughter growing up Italian and not connecting to her English heritage, because your ex forced you to stay in Italy.

I can see how that's really hard to come to terms with. However I think you need to accept that this is her life, she's grown up Italian and she wants a name that reflects that. Grieve the life you wanted, feel the anger at your ex, but accept and love her for who she is, rather than trying to insist she is who you wish she was.

Yes, the amount of projection and overreaching some posters will do to make something a man's fault is quite impressive. Especially considering we only have OPs version of events.

Do you want to alienate your daughter?

If I was your daughter I would be sure to address you with a name that you disliked.

It's her name, not yours. She uses the pronunciation she prefers and you should too. Insisting on using a name and pronunciation she doesn't like is just going to push her away.

You're being very unreasonable in continuing to misname her.

How would you feel if someone called you a name you disliked and insisted on pronouncing it incorrectly to boot?

My eldest asked me a couple years ago if I would be upset if she changed her middle name (my mom's name). I told her it's her name and I'd rather she have a name she likes. She doesn't have to be stuck forever with something she doesn't like.

I understand where you are coming from, but is this a hill worth dying on?

I don't understand why you keep insisting you have to put on an accent to pronounce her name correctly. It's not like you're having to create sounds which don't exist in English or her name is many syllables long. You're saying Eesa not Izza, it's hardly challenging or flamboyant.

You can't have child with an Italian, raise them in Italy and then complain that she wants to use the Italian version of her name. That's incredibly unreasonable.

(But you would still be unreasonable to not call her the name of her choosing even without the cultural context).

Why would she want to consider that? She's an Italian living in Italy using the Italian pronunciation of her name, I doubt she gives a shit that it's also a boy's name in a random culture that isn't anything to do with her.

I was addressing your use of the phrase ‘how boring for you’.