Living with a unique name that is mispronounced.

[AliPG]

I've spent my whole life recorrecting people who mispronounce my name. Its 3 letters long but the 1st letter is often said wrong. The spelling makes it appear a certain way which i get why it would be pronounced wrong. At school it wasn't too bad apart from one teacher who got my name wrong every art lesson. This really annoyed me after a while and even annoyed the rest of the class. Called the register every week but stumbled every time. No other teacher did that. Same teacher pronounced my polish friends surname wrong everytime. I would rather however have a forename that can be pronounced easier.

I dread starting a new employer or hearing my name read out in public settings. When people actually get my name right without asking I'm almost surprised.

At my last job my name was pronounced correctly at interview and throughout my role, bar a couple of people I had to correct. I have now started a new job a month ago and from the get go my name has been pronounced wrong. I corrected interviewer who is my line manager 3 times at interview . She gets it right now thankfully. What I don't get is why on meetings when people hear my name they then still say it wrong. Are they not listening? I'm guessing they read it as it says which I totally get but it is still annoying. Should i just pipe up and say to everyone my name is pronounced like this?

For those who experience this please let me know how you feel and how you deal with this particularly at work. Sometimes it doesn't bother me other times it just grates me when I have told people what it is. I just had to message someone privately who introduced me at a large meeting but said my name wrong. Thing was he has sat on team meetings over the last month and heard my name being said a few times now. He did apologise and ask how to pronounce it which is fair enough. But he had no need to introduce me as all new starters had already been introduced in the 1st month which just annoyed me more and neither is he a manager. My manager said we have already introduced new starters.

Some people don't correct people but I don't see why I should be called the wrong name my whole life. When people ask me how to pronounce it it makes me feel valued and they acknowledge they could get it wrong. When people just keep ignoring it annoys me. It's 3 letters . When people ask if they can call me something totally different I find it ignorant and offensive. I know someone called Joanna and often people call her Joanne. It annoys her and her name is much more known.

I don't know if changing the spelling of my name will help or not for eg work. I'm halfway through life now.

Sorry just having a rant. Will probably feel better tomorrow but for some reason I feel upset today as it is embarrassing for both me and the person saying it wrong. Cant even concentrate on the meeting. It's tiring!!

Even after 15 years with my Irish partner, and having gone over how to pronounce it and even having written it down phonetically, my parents still get a wild panicked look in their eyes whenever they’re about to say it and then usually completely mangle it! Sometimes better than others, my father sometimes nearly bellows it in pride when he thinks he’s getting it right (he never quite has). Sometimes it’s so bad that it’s like watching John Travolta at the Oscars introducing Idina Menzel!

It’s now so worked up and overthought and panicked in their heads that I don’t think they’ll ever get it right.

My partner and I have now decided to think that their attempts are… charming.

Correcting people on their own name is such incredibly odd behaviour. I've seen it happen before and I really can't believe it - what is going through the person's mind when they do it?? Do they genuinely think someone doesn't know how to pronounce their own name??

I understand the frustration - I have an O surname which I've had a lifetime of correcting incorrectly added apostrophes from, but I try to let it wash over me. I think some people naturally find this really difficult, and we seem to struggle as a family (we are a bit tone deaf musically and very bad at learning languages- I've often wondered if the things are related).. My sister sees my daughter (aged 4) 3 to 4 times a week and still can't get her name pronunciation right and shes a hugely generous and involved auntie so its not a lack of care. (S mixed up with Z). She hears us say it the right way and we talked about it a few times but it just won't click with her. I similarly really struggle with a team members name I hear most weeks but I can't recall it its an o like in octagon or an o like in oval. It's really embarrassing because I am genuinely trying to remember the sounds as others say them.

@AliPG it's due to human nature. When you learn to read, you learn phonics, so with a 3 letter word, you will have a way to say it already engrained in your brain.

So when someone starts telling you it's pronounced differently, your brain takes time to un-do the pattern.

It's like playing the piano - I read the note F on the bottom space and a C on the 3rd space up. I now play drums and the F is actually a kick drum and C is a snare drum. Except my brain STILL thinks F and C as I've played the piano for much longer and it takes time to make by brain change.

The older you are, the more forged the paths are so the harder it is.

I imagine thats incredibly frustrating. I have a really bog standard name, can't mispronounce it and the number of people that spell it wrong in emails drives me bonkers, so if I were you I'd be climbing the walls!

I do think there is a processing thing going on with some people and I am sympathetic to that. My DH can't spell, is tone deaf and simply cannot say certain words correctly. It's like he can't hear the syllables. It sometimes annoys me but I know it's not deliberate and he takes special care over names.

What I despise is when someone sees a completely phonetic name but because the person looks foreign, they act like the name is impossible to pronounce and the refuse to remember it. That is pure racism in my book.

I have both an uncommon first name and surname. My middle name too, although a celebrity has made that one easier in the last 20 years or so!
My Christian name is very rarely spelled correctly by anyone, but pronunciation is fine as there really isn’t any other way of saying it. My surname on the other hand has had so many odd and ridiculous pronunciations over the years, occasionally people will just sort of half utter the first letter and then tail off as they have no idea how to proceed. I don’t let either bother me anymore as I’d waste too many years of my life correcting people 😂

I also have a Polish name with 3 letters - I honestly don’t mind. I grew up in Sweden and it was sometimes mispronounced by teachers, although when I think about it now I’m not sure why. The first letter is pronounced the same way in both languages! But it honestly has never particularly bothered me. I’ve lived in the UK for the last 22 years and I’ve been called many different things. It’s an unusual name for the UK so I accept it’s going to be mispronounced. A very good friend of mine mispronounced my name on a daily basis for about 5 years, in the broadest Ozzie accent imaginable, and frankly it was just endearing.

I can understand it’s frustrating but don’t let it get to you too much. It’s innocent mistakes most of the time.

But pronounced Bibble.

I do have time and grace for people who are clearly trying and their brain won’t let them be great!

It’s the ones who cannot be arsed I have no time for.

I don’t have any memory for sounds. If someone has an unusual name and I learn it through reading it first, I will really struggle if the pronunciation is different.

If I am introduced first then that’s ok, I can turn that into a spelling in my head from how it sounds and will be fine from there.

Absolutely!

I have a virtually unpronounceable welsh name but live in England so I get this. My mother is almost the only person I regularly speak to who knows how to say it properly

I get all sorts and am thoroughly used to it.
it doesn’t massively bother me but Yanbu to be hacked off. I think putting an explanation on your email signature is a great idea. People don’t like to get names wrong so help them along a bit.

You can certainly blame them if you've told them before.

My youngest daughter has a name that is frequently mispronounced. To some extent I anticipated it would be, I have found it's not always mispronounced in the way I expected though.

People seem to have problems with the vowel in the middle, they shorten it a lot which I didn't really expect, and also there is a short-e sound at the end that people leave off, which I did think might happen.

What I have realised over the years as people have tried to say it correctly is that quite a lot of them can't actually hear the vowel distinctions in the name. Even if I say it correctly, and then the way they say it, to compare, they can't hear the differernce. So there is no way they are going to be able to say it correctly when they can't even hear the sounds.

Had I been very worried about this, I would have chosen a differernt name, in the end I don't think it matters much and that's the attitude I've taught to my daughter. Some of my family have given her a nicname instead which is fine.

I've since learned from my other daughter, who works with a lot of immigraints from China, that many of them choose "English" names for a similar reason, many English speakers are not able to hear or reproduce some of the sounds in their names correctly. Which makes sense, as the brain loses the capacity to hear some language distinctions if we are not exposed to them early enough.

Honestly some people really just do not listen!
My daughters name, even the friends I see every week and hear me pronounce her name correctly that regularly, still pronounce it wrong. I've just given up correcting it because its awkward and I'm tired of it. It's honestly like they just don't hear the difference.
I've had to accept that it will be up to my daughter how she feels about the pronunciation as she gets older and how much she chooses to fight it but if she wants me to start helping her correct people continuously then I will.
I also have a name which people ignore a letter of to change the pronunciation and my mum gave up correcting people too. I don't mind either pronunciation though, so I don't really bother correcting people but I do introduce myself with the correct pronunciation.
I think people who have names that can only be pronounced in one way just don't even consider that they might be getting other peoples names wrong.

That's not how people's brains work. It can be difficult to remember a word, including a name, you've never encountered before. If it weren't we could all learn new languages so easily, at least the vocabulary.

Some of us are not bad listeners , for some reason we have trouble retaining more unusual names. I find it so embarrassing to have to keep checking how to pronounce names but my brain finds it really hard to process them.

I find Mia (Me ah ) and Mia (My ah ) difficult. I invariably say it wrong.
Also Marie ( Maree) and Marie (Mah ree).
Please give us a bit of slack @AliPG

I know someone called Ioana (she's Romanian I think) which is pronounced
Yo-anna. I noticed recently that when she answers the phone at work she started saying 'Hello Joanna speaking.'

I guess she's got so tired of saying 'Yo-anna speaking' and people hearing 'Joanna' and calling her Joanna that she's given in and started calling herself Joanna.

If you don't want to change your name or the way it should be pronounced (and I get it, why should you?) could you at least find a phonetic spelling to adopt that works for most people? So in Ioana's case she could start spelling it Yoanna on her emails and on work related stuff, then when people phone her or refer to her they will know how they are expected to say it.

My surname is the phonetic spelling of a word that the English language spelling convention has over complicated. The number of times people wave away my offer to spell it for them is unreal. I watch them typing or writing and then just stop because I can't possibly be saying what I am and their minds won't allow it. They really resist deleting the incorrect spelling.

That said, I love my name and would never want to change it. It's their problem, not mine.

I tihnk giving people something to hang it on, like PP suggests, really helps. I'm just not good with names and like others can find them hard to process if they're unfamiliar or unusual pronounciations! I had a colleague whose name was Adeline. I pronounced it Ad-a-leen for ages until she corrected me and said, 'it's actually Ad-a-line, like Caroline'. Once she gave me that to hang it on, I never got it wrong again!

I’ve found it easier to just change the spelling of my name from my native language to the usual English spelling. This seems a more reasonable solution than expecting everyone else to change.

It is very weird how people persist with an incorrect pronunciation. This seems to be the recurring theme here.

Most of our neighbours, some of whom have known us for 25 years, pronounce my name wrong. In conversation with them, my husband will say it the right way, yet they never seem to take it in. That's what annoys me most I think.

Move to another country... . having people who speak a different language valiantly attempt pronunciation when all the letter combinations and positions are totally alien to the way their language is pronounced, is liberating!!