Names spelled with diacritics

[Anonymousmember667]

Apologies if this has been discussed or answered before but I have a question if anyone knows the answer, or who to ask or has any experience please?

So some names have diacritics, usually the name originates from another language other than english. Maybe the most common ones being Seán, Siobhán, Chloé, Zoë, René, Beyoncé etc etc.

Say for example, the name Chloé, Are there any issues registering this name with the diacritic on the “e” in England; on the Birth Certificate, with the NHS, in the school system, with banks, on her passport, driving licence etc etc.

Most people wouldnt know but Its simple to press the alt gr button + the letter to get most of these diacritics on a keyboard or hold the button on an apple keyboard, but do government systems and organisations systems generally support diacritic names?

Is there a right or expectation for organisations to spell your name correctly in England? Doesn't GDPR say this?

Is she destined for a lifetime of her name being spelt wrong or is she allowed to be a Chloé with an “é” !?

Thanks for any advise or experience anyone has 🙏

#in Germany I'm Johann, in England I am John!#

Thank you for that childhood earworm which I will now be humming for the rest of my life, probably. 😱😀

@FightingTemeraire

I didn’t say it was. My point was about those things being accepted and ignored becuase ‘that’s the way it is’ .

I'm just seeing your reply, in my example I was using the verb 'wean' as in, to wean a baby.. The PP had used 'bean' to suggest a word that would rhyme with an anglicised pronunciation of 'sean' without the fada, and I was suggesting other rhyming words.

Wean to mean child is very common here in NI too, and your example of the 'wayne' pronunciation is typical in Derry, due to the spoken accent (as I was talking about earlier when I mentioned accents in Belfast - oops! - not diacritic accents).
Outside Derry, the word 'wean' to mean child has two syllables and is typically pronounced with a diphthong as in 'wee ahn'.
It's clearly a portmanteau of wee one, i.e. little one, and it would make sense that it's used in both NI and Scotland.

My Southern mates enjoy making gentle fun of us Nordies' excessive use of 'wee'.
N: Do you fancy going for a wee pint?
S: Ah jaysus, a 'wee' pint-sized pint would be grand, so. Begorrah. etc.

Do people actually say begorrah?

I was being facetious, and exaggerating ever so slightly to distinguish the Northern caricature by use of 'wee' and the Southern caricature by use of jaysus, grand, so...

ETA I realise I didn't ham up the Northern one as much as the Southern, but that was to counter the piss-taking nature of the exchange

perhaps people do say begorrah though...

They don’t!!
Never that I’ve heard anyway.
Just wondered if you’d actually heard it said.

It's a bit Father Ted, isn't it?
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say 'top of the morning to you' either.

in my part of Wales we don’t say butt; however where I work, loads of people say it, usually men. I was shocked.

I don't think my work systems support this for customers registering with us. This is a big government dept.

Butt is very specific to men from a very narrow geographical area. My brother says it. I’m from port talbot.

That wasn't the point.

We have computers now. We are aware that more than just the King's English exists in the UK. We should do better. What compelling reason is there not to?

Thank you. I did think it was clear that I meant accepting the status quo just because ‘that’s how it is’ isn’t the answer to anything!

It certainly looked like the point. Otherwise slavery and suffrage wouldn’t have been the only subjects mentioned.

I doubt there is a “compelling” reason not to change systems so that Chloé can have a passport with an é in it. I imagine it’s all about cost, complexity and international standards and conventions. The government would probably think there are better uses for resource and money.

And I suppose one might ask whether there’s a compelling reason, or even a sufficient one, for change.

Regarding international standards and conventions — the machine readable code on a passport doesn’t allow accents, but many countries include accents as part of the regular text. I just checked my son’s Irish passport and the fada is included in his name (except in the machine readable part). A quick google indicates that many countries do the same.

If lots of countries do it then it can’t be that technically complex. Cost could be an issue. Supporting the UK’s minority languages would be sufficient reason to change imho but obviously opinions will differ.

I’m all in favour of support for native British languages. But there are lots of ways to do that. I’m not sure diacritics in passports or on driving licences is a worthwhile one though.

If Aer Lingus - Ireland’s national airline - doesn’t accept diacritics for booking, that might suggest that even in countries where diacritics in names are much more common there isn’t any strong issue with dropping them in records and documents.

Aer Lingus is a private company now and the Irish government has no longer any say in its running.

Computers are probably a large part of the problem now.
I’ll bet there’s lots of input sanitising code which uses regular expressions allowing only [a-z][A-Z] in name fields. Finding and consistently changing all instances to an agreed character set isn’t trivial. And then there would be ongoing issues with names originally entered in the basic alphabet not matching to subsequent use of the extended set.

Yes, indeed. I said ‘national’, not ‘nationalised’.

From Aer Lingus’s website:

Founded in 1936, Aer Lingus is Ireland’s national airline, proudly connecting Ireland to the world for nearly a century. As part of the International Airlines Group (IAG), Aer Lingus operates over 100 routes between Europe and North America, and beyond, from its main hub at Dublin Airport. The airline is synonymous with warm Irish hospitality, embodying the rich cultural heritage that makes every journey unique.

Aer Lingus is obviously and rightly proud of being the principal Irish carrier. But it doesn’t take diacritics for booking, apparently.

At the moment no. The company say the computers can’t do so, an old system apparently. They are considering making changes they say. They have been taken to the High Court about it.

Actually, more correctly, the Data Protection Commission have been brought to the High Court about it.
https://www.casemine.com/commentary/uk/de-spainn-v-an-coimisi%C3%BAn-um-chosaint-sonra%C3%AD:-refining-data-correction-protocols-under-gdpr/view

From the judgement:
The Commission's interpretation, which deemed the inability to process diacritics as a technical constraint sufficient to deny the correction request, was found lacking. The Court asserted that reasonable measures should be taken to ensure data accuracy, implying that technological advancements should mitigate previously cited constraints.

Of course, this all relates to a different country, but I’m guessing the equivalent agency in the UK is the one you need to address your concerns to, OP.

Me too but I never heard it actually said until I worked in Merthyr!

I’m assuming the Welsh use of butt has a meaning other than bum 😅
Does it?