Everyone pronounces our daughter's name wrong

[StarShine23]

Hi all, advice needed please.

We named our daughter after someone we know from abroad. Its a pretty simple name but we had never heard it in the UK before. Baby is now 1 and the name has become more popular here, but it has a different pronunciation than we use. The problem we have is we don't like way its pronounced here, but everyone we meet now calls her by the UK version rather than her name, even though we correct them.

Do we:
(a) stick to our original pronunciation, even though it will be a battle for her growing up when other people with the same name all pronounce it the UK way
(b) accept the UK version, even though we dont like it and to us, doesn't suit her
(c) change her name

Has anyone else been through this? What did you do / wish you had done?

We feel awful that we have unwillingly picked something that is going to be tricky for her now all her life, but we love the name.

I’m thinking it’s a stress difference? An-JEL-uh v ANN-juh-luh.
Angela Merkle is An-guh-luh. G like Goat.

He pronounced Saoirse as Sore-sha but that is wrong. Not dialectal, not an accent difference, but a mispronouncation of the Irish spelling. Easily enough done if you don't speak Irish.

He's not the only one who mispronounces the name either. As pp said it's been confused with a different Irish name Sorcha (which isn't pronounced Sor-sha or Sore-sha either but there you go).

Saoirse is not pronounced to rhyme with inertia usually...although it might rhyme with how some Dublin people say inertia.

Anyway it's not Sur-sha like inertia.

Saoirse said in different Irish dialects here @TheOriginalEmu.
Some word pronunciations vary a lot between dialects but Saoirse doesn't really.

https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/saoirse

More pronunciations. It's Seer-sha or sometimes Sair-sha, or somewhere between the two, depending on the speaker.

https://forvo.com/word/saoirse/

@StarShine23
I'm not saying the name, because I don't want to offend any one who is or has children called it and use the UK variant

This is MN, OP. You’ll be offending someone no matter what!

Hey thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately we can't change the spelling, its spelt as we say it.

But this thread has made me realise how common an issue this is.

But if that pronunciation is the established one where you live then those people may not be following your preference but they are not ‘wrong’.

If a Sandra or Alexander moved from the north of England to the south they would find that people pronounced their name differently because of the trap / bath split in English accents. The southerners wouldn’t be wrong, however.

My 27 year old daughter does exactly the same - but hers is spelt as it should be pronounced, except the spelling is Portuguese. Which she has a grandmother who was from there, family going back generations... She goes by a very shortened version now, which she actually hates, for the sake of her own sanity.

My 19 year old son is called the longer Hebrew version of a name that is usually shortened into another name entirely in the UK. There was a row with the in-laws when his (English) grandfather (ex-FIL) essentially renamed him, he gets the "normal" version of his name's spelling from that entire side of the family and I think he was perhaps 4 or 5 when he was asked, by teachers, if he wanted to shorten his name to this other "more English" name entirely. By this point, I was "your choice" about the whole name situations.. DS said absolutely not, wouldn't answer when teachers got him muddled up with the actual other boy in the class called by the more acceptable version (but a totally different) name, and then I'd get calls and letters home about his rudeness...

Not his name, he had made his preferred name very clear (as had I), he wasn't the one being rude.

Then again, his middle name is also a surname. Guess the fun we had with that when he started school and name tags everywhere... (made by the school on coat pegs and work trays...) had his middle name as his surname. (Say, his name was Joe Smith Jones... rather than Joe Jones, his tags all read Joe Smith... that's not his name, obviously!)

(Son and I are, actually, Jewish. Ex was fine with his name - which his sister picked off the short-list, anyway, because ex and I were essentially at war over two totally separate names. Ex's parents are staunch Catholics. Which... we assumed they'd be okay, because it's a biblical name, but nope. Ex and I almost broke up when I was a week post-partum and it's the only time in 48 years that he's ever stood up to his passive-aggressive parents).

Use the pronunciation that YOU want - her name was the first gift, part of her identity, that you tangibly gave your daughter, OP. If its family mispronouncing her name... maybe consider why.

My 19 year old son is called the longer Hebrew version of a name that is usually shortened into another name entirely in the UK

I’m finding this thread both fascinating and frustrating 😀 I keep trying to work out what all these names are - and failing usually!

@BreatheAndFocus Zachariah possibly, as Zachary shortened to Zach/Zack would be more common.

Just a note that when I wrote 'wrong' in the title, it was only because 'surprisingly not the way we heard it before and expected it to be pronounced' is a bit long winded 😆

Nathanael, which is either misspelt as Nathaniel (although... fair enough, it's still the same name) or shortened to... Nathan.

I’m thinking it’s a stress difference? An-JEL-uh v ANN-juh-luh.
Angela Merkle is An-guh-luh. G like Goat

Angela Merkel's pronunciation of her name isn’t a stress thing, though - it’s the standard German pronunciation of Angela, with a hard g.

I don’t really understand your framing of this situation. If this is a frequent issue after only a year then the anglicised version must be pretty well-established. Name popularity doesn’t change that much in a year. I suspect the name was already quite popular but you only started noticing it after you used it for your DD.

….which, to add to my post above, is the issue we're all talking about in a nutshell. You simply can’t expect people in a different country to know to pronounce the name the way you prefer, I'm afraid, so you either have to be philosophical and accept that it most likely will be said differently, or you bring your DD up to spend her life having to tell every single person she has to give her name to that they’re pronouncing it wrongly (which they may not always react well to, if it’s a name also familiar in English - not polite of them, but then people aren’t always polite).

But as ever on these threads, we really do need to know the name, so it’s all a bit notional if it’s going to be kept secret….

[edited for a typo!]

I don't have an unusual name but it is spelt unusually. I spend my life correcting people on how to spell it (bizarrely I get it incorrectly spelt on email a crazy amount even though it is right there in my email!)

I know it isn't the same but I can honestly say as a teen, I wanted to change my name, it drove me insane. I could never find anything with my spelling on it but as an adult, it sets me apart and is a good conversation opener.

I asked my parents why they named me that, they said they loved the name and it suited me. I'd stick to your guns with the name and be prepared to correct people. Her friends at school and teachers once they've got it will go with it and it will become common place.

or they will shorten it like they've done with my daughter, who has an unusual older style name (we only know of 1 other person with that name!) and now that's what she is called by her friends, friends parents, teachers, club leaders.......!!!!

I'm sorry but this is rubbish. Esme has been on a steady increase in the UK since 2001, years before even the books came out, let alone the films. (And I'd question the impact of Twilight anyway - as someone who has never read or seen it, I've heard of Bella Swan and Edward, but not Esme)

It's never been Esmee. (Was Twilight french? No...)

Only indirectly. I was initially Treaclemine after Patcham near Brighton - I wanted to indicate a history for the place which wasn't all TRA. Then my email was changed and I couldn't link the mine to the new address, so I went for the well, near which my sister lives. I mean to see it one day.

I’ve always known Esme as Ez-mee. And I’ve just asked a friend who would also say it that way and was surprised anyone would pronounce it differently.

As far as I know, the footballer Esme Morgan pronounces her name Ez-mee. Commentators certainly do.

So I think you’re wrong.

If it were written Esmé I think I’d try a ‘may’ sound, but not otherwise.

It's one thing English people pronouncing it -mee, it's quite another being surprised that it would be pronounced differently 😂

Please ask your friend how they would pronounce Renee or Andre

Keep using the name and correcting people , just as annoying when people shorten a name that you don't want shortened and as annoying as someone mispronouncing a surname and boy did I get that til I married and still had it with Mum up to last year 😢🙄

It's never been Esmee

Hmm. Well, it really has. I'm old enough to remember knowing of people called that who were pronounced ‘Es-mee'. Just asked DH and he remembers hearing it too. It’s also a man's name, eg a family name of the Dukes of Lennox. Some variants have accents and some not but it seems the 'Esmay' version has been successful in pretty much eclipsing memories of the previous pronunciation.

Why is that funny? That emoji seems a bit try-hard TBH.

You said “it’s never been Esmee”. I’m saying you’re wrong: it has been, and is, Esmee to some - and as far I can tell it’s Esmee to most.

What’s the relevance of different names? You may as well ask how Chloe or Penelope or Persephone are pronounced. Names are generally pronounced by convention.

My friend's dd is called Ivie. Everyone pronounces it as Ivy (like the plant) and she gets really annoyed as she wants it pronounced IH-VEEE-AY so 3 syllables to rhyme with giveaway. It's a daily battle for her dd

There is no way to pronounce that spelling as anything other than eye-vee. Poor kid.