Baby names rejected by French registrars

[ShadowPuppets]

Apparently in France the registrars have quite a strict set of criteria for baby names and this list has been published as names rejected by them in 2021...

Fraise
Nutella
Anomalie
Titeuf
Prince-William
Bob l'eponge
Excel
Metallica
Asterix
Spirou
CR7
Lucifer
Clafoutis
Manhattan
Anal
Mini-Cooper
Daisygual
Fleur de Marie
Folavril
MJ

Some of them seem quite innocuous to me after hanging out on this board! No Balonz, sadly . I do wonder about whoever tried to register their child under the French version of 'SpongeBob SquarePants'....

The main surprise for me was that I actually think Anomalie for a girl is quite pretty Thank god this pregnancy is a DS or DH might have been overruling me!

Source - quite interesting background on the French rules if Twitter's translate button is accurate! twitter.com/fenarinarsa/status/1493578412279087114

@WotgunShedding

What if you wanted to call your child a traditional Chinese name (because you are Chinese) or a traditional Norwegian name (because you are Norwegian) etc?

Countries that do this tend to allow you to go to the Embassy of your country of origin and get them to approve that it is actually a recognised name in your country of origin.

In the case of Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin and names that use other alphabets the names are written in the local alphabet e.g. Latin alphabet anyway.

It helps that lots of names in common use in the UK and actually in many countries, origin from other languages. I had fun looking up my daughter's first name and associated characters in different languages.

Some names are quite frankly ridiculous - we've even have kids called just initials.

This is rather small-minded and parochial. You live in a country that prides itself on being multi-cultural.

@RaraRachael

Oh dear, sorry for daring to have a bit of fun . Some names are quite frankly ridiculous - we've even have kids called just initials.

We're not laughing at the children in our care - we're laughing at the parents - or is that not allowed either?

Yes I agree - one of the (few) perks of working in a school! I am glad I had my DC before I started working in schools!

I don’t like the typical mumsnet sneering at names considered ‘less than’ eg ‘oh you can’t name your child x name they’ll end up a criminal chav benefits king’ since I think it’s small minded and makes the ones saying it look stupid and mean.

However, Anal? SpongeBob? I mean they aren’t even names, who would want to call their child that? I think it’s right that they shouldn’t be allowed to register a child’s name as Anal. If they love it so dearly they can change their own name to Anal and call the baby Lily or Megan or Sara.

The OP is talking about France and French parents.

It's very possible that Anal doesn't mean the same in France. Also that perfectly acceptable British names mean 'anal' in French...

So some of these date quite a way back. The old rules in France were very strict. Thee was a list of names, mainly saints and ones from the revolutionary calendar, as well as some other important historical names. There was a separate 'foreigners' desk, and there you could use other names. A few of these, like Fleur de Marie, date to the old law.

In the 1990s, France liberalised the law, and now it's only a question of whether the name is considered "embarrassing" in some way, which is a sticky test. '

In the USA many states will not allow anything other than the English alphabet--no accent marks, numbers, etc. You can be Maria or Jose on your birth certificate, but not María or José. Elon Musk already had to change A-12 to A-Xii, but he also can't have Æ on there, even though it's what the news stories printed.

This article has some explanations for the names: www.huffpost.com/entry/forbidden-baby-names-france_n_5a0908b2e4b0e37d2f385889

@mathanxiety

Anal in French is anal. Or anale. So, no, there is no English name that means anal in French, and it’s not a lovely French name that happens to have the meaning of anal in the uk. So it’s not actually very possible that anal means something different in France.

The Arabic name
انيل
is the letters Anyl.

This is why saying names are ridiculous is cruel. There is often an explanation rooted in another language.
The initials thing is common in Indian languages where the names are unmanageably long.
Sometimes initials are better for spelling.
AJ and E, for instance, are easier to read than Ajay or Aodh.
Bob L'éponge though, has no justification that I can come up with. Did a kid suggest it? Or was the parent simple?

@ZoyaTheDestroyer

Yes I know dd3 is 18 for starters you will notice I spoke of when she got her Danish passport

My point was more that there are names in the UK that are said no to despite them claiming there not being a law that says so.

There's a difference between saying "our systems can't cope with the spellings" and saying "you can't have that name", although I think the registrar in the UK can refuse a name. My parish priest refused to put my name on my baptism certificate, (pre1983) but that's a Catholic thing and canon law has changed in 1983.

[quote Enko]@ZoyaTheDestroyer

Yes I know dd3 is 18 for starters you will notice I spoke of when she got her Danish passport

My point was more that there are names in the UK that are said no to despite them claiming there not being a law that says so.[/quote]
I was just adding an observation

I don't agree that being unable to use certain characters is a de facto ban for certain names but I suppose it depends whether you consider a name spelt with the internationally accepted transliteration to be a different name to the one spelt with the original characters. My goddaughter is Zoë but she is Zoe on her UK birth certificate and passport. I wouldn't therefore say that the registrar had banned her parents from naming her Zoë.

In fact, going back to your original post it sounds like the registrar did all she could to register your preferred spelling despite the limitations of her system? I appreciate it probably doesn't look terribly pretty on her BC but it sounds like she tried.

Actually the registrar was really rude and I had to pull out a letter I had from the general registrar office to prove I could name her that.

But that was not the point of this thread hence I didn't include it.

@TravellingFrom. No it wasn’t it was Megan without an E which was not allowed in France! They settled for Marie instead.

Interesting. I believe in the UK names sometimes get rejected too. There was a case in Wales where a woman wanted to name her baby Cyanide. It went to court and she was told no by the judge: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-36045987

@Aderyn21

Anyone who tries to call their child Anal should have a visit from social services! Normally I'm not in favour of state interference in peoples personal lives but that list shows how fucking stupid some people are. I wouldn't trust them to water a plant, let alone name a child!

I wonder if it was just a misspelling. I worked as a teacher in the Middle East and I had an ‘Anal’ on my register for a while, it turns out that when the admin staff had translated ‘Amal’ from Arabic she’d got ‘n’ and ‘m’ muddled up!

Interesting how much debate sparked from what I thought was a non-controversial OP ! I don't find it particularly shocking that these names were rejected. This is not "a stranger judging your baby's name", this is a government official sparing your child a lifetime of embarrassment.

And for those wondering I do think foreign name are allowed, provided it's actually an established name in another country and does not have an embarrassing meaning in French. So for instance I'm pretty sure a Russian couple living in France would be able to call their child Vsevolod or Gordey.
(For what it's worth one of my kids' middle names is Ilya and that didn't raise any eyebrows).

Though it's pretty shocking how many people manage to misspell Ilya even after being given a copy of his passport !

Bob l'eponge

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

@Georgyporky

I know a baby Ariya. Next one could be Qashqai.

Ariya or Arya is a super common name in Indian families.

This thread is great. Bob l’eponge 🤣🤣🤣