Oisín - am I overthinking it?

[Meeko505]

We are due a boy later this year. We live in England, I'm 100% English, my partner is Irish (+ all family are Irish and live in Ireland) but he has an English accent because he grew up here. We do plan to take the baby to Ireland to visit GPs at least once or twice a year.

We like the Irish name Oisín (Ush-een) quite a lot, but I have some concerns that I'd like to check with others:

1. Is it wanky to use a very Irish name like this if only one parent is Irish etc.?
2. I have two older children with a different dad. However, they aren't very close to their Dad and feel more attached to my Irish partner. If we have one or two kids with Irish names, does it create a feeling of two 'separate' sets of kids/could it make my older kids feel less a part of his family as they get older? (Am I just being really paranoid here?)
3. If we go with an Irish name for this baby, I feel quite strongly that a future baby should follow suit. I'm not sure why, tbh. I suppose it might feel like one kid has a more concrete tie to their Irish heritage while the other doesn't?
4. Maybe most obviously, is this name going to be OK in England? Spelling + pronounciation-wise?

The other name I really like is Wilfred, which doesn't have any of these issues but my partner seems to really prefer Oisín.

Oisin is lovely.
Wilfred is the opposite.

@Meeko505 it must be becoming popular, this is the 3rd thread I've read about the name in last few days.

I think using an Irish name is lovely.
id also use an Irish name for subsequent babies

he will spend his life having to tell people how to say it, then keep correcting them & spell it all the day long when he is able to!

I personally don't love it, but if you do, then do it!!

I'm not keen on Wilfred, but I have a soft spot for Wilf! (Due to a MNers lovely son 😉 Who has grown up amongst us oldies!! 👋🏻)

Oh yeah, if we went for Wilfred I'd be fully intending for him to go by Wilf mostly!

Kids with Irish names in UK here!

1. its fine - would it be wanky to use a very British name like Wilfred given only one parent is English?!
2. I think you are definitely overthinking this!
3. why not - lots of lovely Irish names about
4. yes people will ask and struggle to spell but it isn’t an issue. I would caveat this by saying we live in a very nice liberal part of UK so people are lovely about checking they pronounce it correctly etc. this might be different if you live in a part of the UK that heavily voted Brexit/UKIP/adore Nigel farage etc etc. your English family will wonder why you chose something so off beat but to be fair his family will raise eyebrows at Wilfred so either way!!

go with whatever name you and your partner love! For us it was nice to have a connection as I’m Irish. Also also have to agree that with the poster that English names aren’t neutral, they’re English, which is fine, but it’s not that they’re normal and all other countries are different.

It's not as unusual as it was! I have a brother called Oisin, and for decades he was the only one I'd ever heard of (he's nearly 60). Now there's a few others.

We also had one Irish parent, we were born and raised in England.i also have an Irish name, my other sibling doesn't. My Irish parent never lived with us but I don't remember anyone ever suggesting that we shouldn't have Irish names - just the names were a bit weird!

My brother LOVED having a name that no one had heard of and no one could spell. I was much less confident and would have preferred to be called Susie, but there you go - kids are all different. Nowadays, I can't imagine a child getting teased for just having an unusual name, but then I live in London where there are a LOT of unusual names.

I mean as an English person with a terrible grasp of languages I have no idea how you get Usheen from Oisín and probably would have missed that the last vowel isn't just an i if it was a general text announcing your baby

HOWEVER if you said "this is [usheen]" then that's how I'd say it. And his first birthday/Xmas is ask how do you spell that? And I'd keep the text and refer to it whenever I needed to spell it. I'd completely break the link between spelling and pronunciation because I don't understand it, but I'd say it and write it correctly.

Really? What assumptions? And why are those assumptions negative?

My children have the same parental set up you describe but the other way round (English dad). They both have Irish names. One in particular is unusual in the U.K., no one ever gets the spelling, it's often mispronounced. (Think B instead of V - v sound in Irish is spelled mh or bh). She loves it though. I asked her just yesterday if she minds and she was very unbothered.
The other one has a slightly more common name but we dropped the fada on her name as she's growing up in England and I could foresee a lifetime of issues with plane tickets etc.

It’s really Aw-sheen (aw rhyming with saw) rather than ush (rhyming with lush).

"The political implications of having an Irish name in NI are completely different to having the same name in Britain (or, indeed, in Ireland)"

Yep, I'm from NI, went to university in Dublin, uni friends from the south were touchingly innocent on this subject. A conversation ensued about there being two local newspapers in our town, and if you were going to the beach at the weekend where you went pretty much depended on, well....
They were absolutely stunned. English people would be pleasantly clueless too...as it should be. Oisín is a lovely name, and even up here in Norn Iron there are loads of mixed marriages and most of the population doesn't care any more, so an Oisín with an English accent would be unremarkable.

I've seen Oisin (on here) and didn't have a clue how to pronounce it, but now I do! You'll be fine.

maybe where you're from, but all the Oisíns I know pronounce it ush-een.

We’ve got a Roisin. Love England one parent English one Irish. Took a bit of explaining how to say it by us then by her later on ( she does the thing in Starbucks where she gives a different name) I love Oisín. My other kids have a mix of Irish and English names. Don’t overthink it. My Roisin is now 18 and loves having an unusual name ( very easy for emails as she seems to be the only Roisinipredictariot anywhere !

Wilfred is cute. Little Wilf.

Honestly in the school I work in we’ve have some really difficult names to set to memory. But ive made sure Ive got them. We had an Ossian but that was pretty easy to be fair.

It's fine. I'm guessing you know the legend it comes from? The Fianna and Niamh in Tir Na Nog.

Wilf isn't any better. It's such a drippy wet name.

I pronounce it aw-sheen. Might be a northern thing.

Is it pronounced 'you-sheen'? Or 'ocean'?
I'm never sure, but I do quite like both of those so I guess I like it!

I really dislike names with accents. They give the person a life long headache trying to write out their name online, in text, in word documents, etc. Dont do it

I think the problem isn't correcting people once, it's the amount of people he/you will have to correct on a daily basis, it will get super annoying for him.

Ush-een, osh-een, or aw-sheen, apparently, depending on where you're from. We will probably pronounce it most like ush-een or thereabouts.

@Meeko505 ah, thank you! It is nice, but yeah, I can see it getting mispronounced quite a bit.

I like Oisín - it will cause some spelling / pronunciation issues if you’re not living in Ireland, but it’s getting more popular and you usually introduce yourself by saying your name, so most people will know how to say it straight away. I think it’s fine about the other worries you had - definitely overthinking those.

Usheen south of the border, osheen (rhyming with gosh) north of the border IME.

I think it's a lovely name (don't go for Wilf; isn't that one of Boris's children?). I've come across a couple in the UK and it's not a hard name to pronounce.

My DS goes to a very diverse school and loads of the children in his class have names that I wouldn't know how to pronounce (wit would mangle terribly!). DS (4) can say them all perfectly and just rolls his eyes when I get it wrong!