Frances? Does it matter if we pronounce it differently?

[hopeful4us]

Currently expecting baby #2 and struggling to find a girls name we both agree on.

Frances is top of our list but my husband is northern and pronounces it clipped: 'Fran-sis'. I'm from the south and pronounce it 'Frarn-ses'. I'm happy to adjust my pronunciation but my family will also likely say it the southern way and my husband is concerned our baby will dislike it/get confused.

Anyone with a similar name/various regional pronunciations able to comment on whether they find it irritating?

I do love Frances as a name.

As a southerner in the north im now practising both accents on it 😆

I dont think it matters. There must be tonnes of words you pronounce differently (bath, castle...). Your children will adapt and choose whichever pronunciation they prefer whilst taking the micky out of the other one.

my husband is from Liverpool. We'll never say words the same. You just have different accents

I’m Scottish and only heard it the Ses way

It’s an awful name though so old fashioned and the shortenings Fran/Fanny are just terrible

I think it’s lovely either way.

I think it's fine to pronounce it differently depending on your accents. The same would happen with lots of names and you can't rule them all out!

How does it currently go at "bath" time? Or if you want to feed the "ducks" in the park? Are you able to communicate? Obviously the best thing to happen would be the northerner learns to speak properly.

The second letter of my name is A.
People from home, ie the north pronounce it like bath and path.
My southern friends pronounce it with a long A ie barth , parth.
It really doesnt matter - its just different accents

This is just a regional pronunciation thing. I would never say your way because I’m Scottish and it would involve putting on a fake English accent and sounding absurd/like I was taking the piss.

DH is English and we pronounce lots of stuff differently. Just how it is.

Ah I had this dilemma with DS2. He is Alexander, I’m southern but DH is northern and we live up north.

I actually hated it for many years and used to cringe at myself every time I said his name. I think people thought I was trying to be posh 🤣 I did have serious baby name regret, but luckily as he got older he just became Alex and now I love it again.

She’ll likely end up being Fran so all will be well.

My name includes the letter r in the middle. People with rhotic accents pronounce the r, those with non-rhotic accents don't. It has never bothered me. I expect your Frances will get used to the different pronunciations of her name as well.

BTW I love the name Frances.

Your husband's fears are unfounded.

Babies/ toddlers are fully capable of absorbing and blowing right past differences in accent.

As she grows, she will surely encounter many other words that sound different in the two accents in her home. Depending on where she lives, one is probably going to become dominant.

I have an Irish accent and my DCs have an American one. There are certain words that made me cringe when they said them - one being France - and they quickly learned to emphasize certain vowel sounds just to see me grind my teeth :-)

One of them has a name that sounds like another name altogether (imo) in some American accents but she had no difficulty understanding that people were talking to her, even at a very young age.

As long as your DH and his family are not going to moan every time you pronounce it your way, and vice versa, it will be fine. Your DC will soon have to get used to different accents for hundreds of words. It's part of being a north/south family.

My childrens' names have more than one pronuanciations. It's really not an issue.

We vetoed Natalia because our accents meant we couldn't agree on how to pronounce it. We had other options though so it depends how attached you are to the name.

My dd is called Sofia and we all pronunce it Sof-ee-a but a lot of people pronounce it So-fee-a which annoys her lol. Would I have let it put me off naming her that? Absolutely not

I think it’s a lovely name - and I really don’t think it matters a scrap if you and your family say it one way, and DH and his family say it another way. My DH is from farther up the map than me, so he says one of my DD’s names differently from me, and it really doesn’t worry me a jot.

I am from the North and would say
Fransess.
Francis is a boys name pronounced Fransiss

If you put the stress on the first syllable, then I think that is unusual. Most people will assume the stress is on the second syllable.

I say it in a different way to both you and your husband - Fran-ses. Not Frarn- and not -sis.

I really like the name anyway. I used to work with a young Frances who shortened it to Ces.

ETA - realised I didn't answer your question. I don't think it matters that she'll hear her name said in different accents, that's just part of life.

Lovely name.

(I have a PhD in linguistics and have studied phonetics/phonology + language acquisition to Masters level.)

Babies are completely capable of understanding different accents so there is no issue here at all. Please don't adapt how you say her name- she will be working out the different phonological systems of your accent and your husband's ("Mummy says 'grass', 'path' and 'Frances' with a long a, Daddy says them with a short a, so these sounds must somehow go together, and I can expect daddy to say 'bath' with a short a if mummy says it with a long a etc"- obviously this is an unconscious process not conscious thought).

For you to say her name in your husband's accent is going to throw her a curveball and make things harder, if anything (I mean, it will be fine- babies are very adaptable- but it will be an outlier in the patterns she is building in her mind about how language works). It's similar to multilingual families- babies learn much more quickly if mum speaks French to them and dad speaks German, but that process is slowed where both parents use both languages or mix their sentences between the languages, even though they are often trying to make things easier by doing this.

I think it would sound a bit odd if you adopted a northern accent purely for your daughter's name, and carried on pronouncing every other word the southern English way e.g. "bath" and "grass".

It reminds me of when newsreaders try to pronounce foreign names with the relevant accent, e.g. putting on a fake Italian accent to say "Silvio Berlusconi". I think it sounds contrived.

It's the FRARNces Vs FRANces not the ending she means is different.

Love the name Frances and I think it will be fairly unusual these days. I can't imagine different pronunciations will matter. I mean, it's not as if her name will be totally incomprehensible in either accent and she's not likely to have her little mind blown by other words such as bath for example.

Except OP highlighted the ending too
" my husband is northern and pronounces it clipped: 'Fran-sis'. I'm from the south and pronounce it 'Frarn-ses'".

My husband and I pronounce many words, Inc DC'S names differently. It's fine!

Will say though every Frances I've known has intensely disliked their name. I'm pretty neutral on it, but that's my personal feedback from knowing people living with it.