Find bilingual baby names
mixedname.com
mixedname.com
When they moved to New Zealand, he quickly found that his name was pronounced "burnt", and after some time decided to change his name to Brent.
Many years later he moved back to Norway, and quickly realized "brent" is Norwegian for "burnt"...
Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.
Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying.
Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.
There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
Gabriele and Andrea come to mind.
Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or the other.
When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly. I don't fault them, I don't mind, but I appreciate if someone makes an effort (even if it's wrong, it's only about trying) to call me by my name rather than by a translation thereof.
(Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether... For the symbols /lyk/, I've tested all voices: Dutch, French (+Canadian), Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Turkish, and Swedish are correct, whereas English, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese incorrectly read the IPA. Some others are glitchy or mixed results between male/female voices.)
Btw, this sound also exists in German and is spelled “y”. If you meet a German and want them to say your name in your preferred way, tell them to imagine it’s spelled “Lyk”.
Lyk is an interesting option I should try with germans. It makes the vowel sound a bit too 'short' but it's very close indeed. Let's see what results that gets compared to Lüc :)
I'm guessing the goal is to reproduce an accent, but if the natural language doesn't have the IPA in its phonology, then it's going to be mapped to the nearest representation. English doesn't distinguish between /y/ and /u/, so a native English speaker being asked to reproduce a /y/ sound (especially in running speech where you're not thinking about how to pronounce the sound in particular) is likely to end up with something near /u/ anyways.
Giving you flat-out the wrong sound (not an accented rendition) should not be default behavior. There could be an option for rendering "how would an american approximate/recreate this sound after I sounded it out to them", but that's a different tool and not an IPA-to-sound converter.
> When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly.
The consonant at the end of my name makes it impossible for many people to pronounce it correctly. You would have a similar problem; a Mandarin speaker would have no difficulty producing /ly/, but in the best case your full name would come out in two syllables as /ly.kɤ/.
If it's any consolation, the original form of the name had /u/, and the French /y/ is a later historical development internal to French. ;D
That’s pretty much it. Most people with foreign names are used to many pronunciations in the US and I am comfortable and will respond to any of them.
I think it’s a pretty cool site but the overlap between China and the rest of the world is perhaps insufficient in reality. Sad.
The way I pronounce my son's name, who speaks French, Russian and English, also depends on which language I speak to him.
Even shorter, if the languages include Brazilian Portuguese: "Ana".
(Source: In a research poster/demo session in the US, I'd named one of the example characters as "Ana", since I was recently interested in Brazil, and had been seeing that name. One of the people who saw the poster/demo wasn't a native English speaker, but they made an effort to kindly and gently point out the spelling error, with a smile, as if they were trying to save me from the additional embarrassment of showing the error any longer. I thanked them, and didn't tell them.)
My close English speaking friends and colleagues pronounce my name the "correct" way, according to my native language.
Acquaintances, distant colleagues and new people I meet will pronounce it the Engish way.
I've learned to react to both pronounciations.
We ended up with Daniel.
> Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna".
As a sanity check, I looked up wikipedia's page on Czech phonology, which indicates that the vowel [æ] does not exist in Czech. That by itself will absolutely prevent the English names Hannah /'hænə/ or Anna /'ænə/ from matching any possible Czech pronunciation.
I'm kind of curious how you came up with the examples.
(Ali is a name that will transfer well across many languages.)
> In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad.
People can overlook what I consider stupid obvious requirements in this kind of scenario. I knew a Chinese girl who used the English name Cynthia. It's a perfectly respectable English name; the only problem was that she was completely unable to pronounce "Cynthia", making it a challenge for her to communicate her own name to English speakers.
I don't understand why Chinese speakers don't put more [any] emphasis on using names that they are themselves able to pronounce, like Tina or Julie.
Some are assigned an English name by their first English teacher in school. This English teacher themselves may not really be able to speak English (e.g. this is the case for more than one person in my family). By the time they figure out otherwise, it's kinda stuck/habit.
We went with names that are not native-Hebrew, but are easy to pronounce in all three languages.
It's a cool concept, but I think it's needs more humans reviewing the data.
There's really no way for Charlotte or Adele or Hunter to be Vietnamese.
We are Dutch and Polish, met in France, converse in (mostly) English, and worked in a few more, and now live somewhere with a dialect that only our oldest commands.
Double checking meaning and pronouncability involved at least four languages for us, and it wasnt easy, especially when you are nonnative!
In Europe, this is not that special, and in many other places neither. So many countries have people that speak a few natively.
The site clearly has comparison data between all languages if you scroll down on the homepage. Feels similar to the results page between two languages, where it'll say "I've got 1234 names for Dutch and 2345 names for German" in a nice venn diagram, but then omits the most interesting information of how many names it found shared between the two! (The answer, btw, was 402. You can copy and paste them to an editor with line numbers.)
I ought to contact them to add an English-compatible Turkish girls' name: Semen. (From Yasemin, or Jasmine.)
But people have been making variations of names for a long time for things like this.
Something that I wonder about is when Russian "e" gets transcribed "e" and when it gets transcribed "ye". They both happen and there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason. All other iotated vowels are consistently transcribed with leading Y.
I am pretty sure that in most cases where the vowel is transcribed "e", it's still iotated and should have been transcribed as "ye". But I'm not completely sure. Is there a rule that frequently reduces e to э?
I note that the English-language wiktionary entry for Семён indicates that the е is iotated. :/
A translator from Russian to English who feels that ё is not a real letter may transcribe it as ye or e; if he likes ё or wants to be faithful to Russian phonetics, he will write yo. Few are the translators who will consider avoiding an English reader's confusion as a goal.
1. [je] if stressed (or [ɪ̯ɪ] if unstressed) at the beginning of a syllable
2. in the middle of a syllable, it usually indicates the palatalization or softening of the preceding consonant (the softening in Russian is phonemic and can change the word's meaning; also, a few consonants are exceptional and non-softenable, except possibly in a small number of further exceptions) which is followed by the [e] vowel if the syllable is stressed or [ɪ] if unstressed
3. but in some words, in the middle of the syllable it indicates the vowel [ɛ] and does not change the preceding consonant (i.e. it's pronounced exactly like э)
So how do you represent this when transcribing into the Latin alphabet in a way that more-or-less reflects both the original Russian spelling and original Russian pronunciation?
The typical solution is to transcribe case 1 as "ye" and cases 2 and 3 as "e", which is both not quite accurate and not consistent with how other Russian vowels are transcribed, but is "good enough" on balance. Or you can use "ye" for both case 1 and 2, and "e" for 3; this is how you get "nyet", and that particular transcription of "нет" has become traditional - since it avoids ambiguity with the English "net". Linguistic and academic publications of course have more complex schemes.
This is another area where I think something strange is going on between the traditional terminology and the reality.
So, I read (without direct personal experience) that Spanish speakers feel strongly that there is a real difference between "ñ", the Spanish spelling of a palatal nasal stop, and "ny", which would be the spelling of an ordinary dental/alveolar nasal stop that just happens to be followed by a palatal glide.
A doubter might suspect that "ny" would be reduced to "ñ" in fluent speech. In either case, this is not a difference that an English speaker can hear.
I watched a series of "learn Russian" videos on youtube, from a native Russian, and her example of consonant softening was to draw a contrast between the English words "beauty" (with 'soft B') and "booty" (with 'hard B'). But this is much less ambiguous than the case of Spanish ñ - there is no possible way that the place of articulation of the /b/ gets drawn back to the hard palate. That would sound nothing like a /b/. It seems mandatory, to me, to analyze what is called a "soft B" as being an ordinary /b/ with following or partially coarticulated /j/. [This suggests an obvious followup question: is it possible for a Russian word to end in "вь"?]
So it seems more natural to me to say that "е" always includes a /j/ before the vowel, and that /j/ may combine with a preceding consonant to produce a palatalized consonant, if that preceding consonant allows. This analysis would be greatly strengthened if the /j/ continued to be present in words where a letter "е" was preceded by the hard sign, but I don't know enough to provide an example of that or to say that it can't happen. [Actually, that particular analysis would fail in that case, but it would strongly suggest a new analysis in which "e" is always a two-phoneme sequence /je/, and the preceding consonant is completely independent of the glide, but consonants that are already palatalized may absorb the glide, such that there is an automatic reduction of тье -> тьз.]
> but in some words, in the middle of the syllable it indicates the vowel [ɛ] and does not change the preceding consonant
Does this happen with preceding consonants that are not inherently soft? e.g. my understanding is that ш is hard while щ is soft (and the sounds are otherwise equivalent) - on this analysis, ще would involve no change to the consonant because the change is already baked in to the spelling, and ше would be more or less nonsensical.
> So how do you represent this when transcribing into the Latin alphabet in a way that more-or-less reflects both the original Russian spelling and original Russian pronunciation?
I don't think this statement of the goal can explain why it's standard to transcribe the name as "Lena". That fails to reflect the spelling, which in Russian uses "е", and it also fails to reflect the pronunciation, which is not equivalent to Лъэна. When the spelling calls for some kind of palatalization, and the pronunciation involves some kind of palatalization, how do we get a transcription that calls for no palatalization?
And as you note:
> which is both not quite accurate and not consistent with how other Russian vowels are transcribed
Why is the transcription of е so different from the transcriptions of я and ю? What goal is that serving?
Perhaps the website could add dictionary definitions of the names in each language to help avoid these issues
I think that's their point.
> add dictionary definitions ... to help avoid these issues
It doesn't give definitions, but it kinda already does that by showing you it's a word in the other language (rather than just a name), so you know you'd better look it up before use.
Not for me.
The suggestions are: Cari, Karli, Kismet, Lara, Leila, Leyla, Nadia, Selma, and Yasmin.
The English names it explicitly warns you against, because they're indeed words in Turkish, are: ..., Bina, Dede, Eden, Elle, Elma, Eve, Evin, ...
That these are warnings could be more clear, though. The color scheme is the same as the suggestions. Then again, the heading text is pretty big.
But that's the easy bit right, there's already tools (e.g. Google Translate) for that.
Statistics Sweden are publishing some statistics:
> 131 men have Adolf as a first name normally used
> The average age for the name Adolf is 74 years amongst men
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/n...
You have twenty children, 19 of which have names that are easily pronounced by Americans?
(Feedback if the author is here: can't link to a section!)
In a div with the class top_names (there's no ID or a[name]), it shows the names that occur in most languages: Sara and Maria (21 languages) and Adam and Daniel (18 languages). There's also second and third places with 19, 18, and 17, 16 languages for female and male, respectively.
There's also this near the bottom, leftover testing or just seeing if anyone notices?
<script>document.write("hello");</script>
So you might as well choose the official name name that the average bureaucrat in your jurisdiction is unlikely to misspell, and use other name(s) in different cultural or linguistic contexts.
Everyone knows me as Ritesh. It does not appear on any of my identification.
I've dealt with this for 38 years.
And the address should match still so actually why do they care anyway?
Most people get it when I tell them, “no one calls me Xitij, it’s impossible to pronounce.”
For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.
This feels like it will be annoying whenever someone asks for your name in order to write it down or when they are trying to read it. This happens a lot in a school context.
Of course only one of them is your 'actual' name anyway, the other is just by its existence making your name familiar and easy to pronounce. It having a different local spelling (if that's the case) doesn't have to matter or be annoying unless you decide it is. Anything where it's important obviously you make sure to get it right, as you would anyway.
Even simple names, like somebody mentioned Maria, can sound different enough to be annoying in the right parts of the country.
There are downsides to the different spellings.
I have this issue within English. There are several ways to Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally, some spell it Mathieu.
I hate to use phones for any kind of personal info transfer for this reason, as it has caused headaches everywhere from the bank to travel agents to charitable donations to even sharing my email.
For Michael, there is only one spelling, but people nevertheless frequently misspell the name.
My favorite comment on this topic came from a Michael who, when consulted about the spelling Micheal, observed "people named Michael don't spell it that way".
Arnaud and Arno sound the same! (in this language pair.) In Dutch, I know both an Arnaud and an Arno, and it's pronounced correctly^W like you read it (IPA: /ɑrnʌud/ and /ɑrnoː/) so that threw me off probably.
Anyway, your request is a bunch of human labeling work if there isn't already IPA conversions for every name (and if LLM can't already guess correctly 95% of the time and that's good enough for an initial comparison), but from an algorithmic standpoint shouldn't be hard: use the same comparison but on phonetic spellings of the names rather than language-specific spellings. Example: in Dutch, we pronounce "u" like IPA /y/, whereas German pronounces it as /ü/, so any name with "u" in it will automatically be incompatible pronunciation-wise.
Maybe when they're a child, but once they become an adult, having the same spelling becomes important to avoid bureaucratic headaches, especially now that KYC is becoming so strict. Are you sending money to yourself or someone else when the name is spelled differently on the two accounts?
Expecting parents and their inner circle are always discussing 'cute baby names,' forgetting in the arc of life their child will only [typo] be a baby a short time (fate willing and all that).
When I consider names, my standard is; "Would this sound solid and respectable if <the name> were the head of my division / a diplomat / leading thinker", etc.
If it doesn't feel like it'd be a fit for those "life roles," it's scratched.
(We only have one, a boy, and it met that standard but I still do that thought experiment on the premise if we'd had a girl.)
Except they were going to call me Marg. Hard G. Like Ms Helgenberger, the actress. I probably wouldn’t have been that attractive, which is pretty much the only way to survive with such a horrible name.
English <-> Russian is much better, but it misses the mark a lot. It also offers a lot of names that are too informal (e.g. Tanya is an informal variant of Tatiana).
I'm Italian and my partner is French and we searched for names that would be identical for Italian and French.
We did it manually and the trick is for each partner to look at names of the other language and write down the ones that are the same in theirs.
For example I'm Italian and so I read a list of French names and could easily spot the ones that are identical in Italian too. Also my partner who is French red a list names in Italian and could easily spot the ones that are identical in French.
In Italy most female names end in A and most male name end in O (with some exceptions we mentioned). It's very easy to find female Italian-French-English names because also in English and French some female name end in A/E. So we found a lot of options for Italian-French female names.
Male names were more of a challenge since almost no French male name end in O.
I wonder what the source for the names is. Kai is #289 in at least one list of the most popular names given to German kids in 2022: https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022. So I'm surprised that it wouldn't show up in a list of >1000 "German" names.
Turns out two of the names were on both the lists, so we went with them. I have a feeling that it wasn’t so important that they were on my lists.
"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."
At least, I have no indication that it does more than just find which items in list A also occur in list B. This text on the results page also hints at that: "All of the suggested [language_A]-[language_B] names on this page are matched solely on their written form"
The standard way to pronounce "a" in foreign words is as in "father". But this one makes me curious; Hindi is like English in that a written "a" is often pronounced reduced. (Compare the traditional spelling suttee to the "reformed" spelling sati, which more closely reflects the Devanagari spelling, or the spelling of the English word "jungle" to the Hindi word of the same pronunciation, jangal.)
So it's possible that a highly nativized pronunciation of "Pavit", if stressed on the second syllable, might be correct!
I'm English but learning Hindi, so I know to pronounce it 'puh-vit' as it were, but 'naturally' (or however many years since I started learning ago) I would read/say it like पैवित almost, you know, short English 'a'.
Almost all of the English ∩ Danish are completely wrong. "Alannah, Aleesha" etc.
Take this site with a spoonful of salt...
Perhaps easier to understand examples are Kathy and Abigail. Pretty names in English but they will get completely butchered in Danish. Kathy will pretty much lose the h, and become Cat-i. Abi works, but gail will sound like the German "geil".
We chose Josef. Interestingly the webpage doesn't show Josef. Most likely because they don't steming when doing the comparison
Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very uncommon names).
It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very different.
[1] Hint: it isn't.
Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal hoops.
i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo), but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the masculine chinese names show up with , or £ in them.
So it isn’t always necessary to have a single name that can translate into X languages, but that there is a version of the name in the languages you care about.
I've got a family with "all the colors" (my daughter's nieces/nephews are white, black and asian) and yet we picked a very french name, very hard to pronounce for native english speakers and native japanese speakers (we've got japanese family).
And it's a conversation starter, for example: "It's easy: the sound 'ance' (part of my kid's name) is exactly the same as how french people pronounce the 'ance' in 'France'".
People are curious. And they try to say it right. And they succeed very quickly.
New school this year: two months in several teachers and kids can already pronounce the name correctly.
I've always considered my name to be the sound, the spelling is just an implementation detail.
That’s often not possible, due to the differences in the phonetic repertoire of the respective languages.
I only encountered this as an adult and I'm not easily bothered, but I can imagine a kid or teenager feeling quite different about their name being a conversation starter after years of the same.
Also have no idea why how/why a few Canadian-Italian families named their daughters “Andrea” which is traditionally a male name in Italy.
On the other hand, there's a pretty famous Canadian woman named Andrea as well...
Most of the names listed for Danish/English combo does not make any sense in Denmark.
It's still interesting to me though. I have a daughter due in February and we're trying to come up with names now. My initial idea was to take the female name list that I downloaded from the US Census, and try to come up with a set of rules to screen out names that sound good with our family name and chosen middle name. For instance, our family name starts with a G, so i don't want to choose a name that also starts with G. I also don't want a name that rhymes or sounds silly with our family name.
For the US, I found it helpful (and fun) to download the social security data on frequency of names for each year, so that I could then plot the popularity of a given name over time. This was also helpful for considering how unisex a name is or isn't.
The site misses the mark. Either the cultures share the bible in which case most biblical names are game, or they don’t in which case a phonetic similarity match is the way forward.
To find a good name internationally recognized just open a Bible. Anna, Maria, etc. Some biblical names are different, though: Giovanni - John - Jan.
For my second son, I used ChatGPT to help. It nailed it.
- Mireille / 미래 (Mirea/Milea)
- Sarah / 사랑 (Sarang/Salang)
I tried mixednames.com but Bashkir or Tatar are not available
We struggled a lot more with our second son....
Some of those e.g., Coen, Derk, Gerbrand in the "Usage of X in different languages / cultures" only has a checkmark for Dutch.
Or take a look at Chinese and English names. Park is not Chinese...
It also appears to be based off a nounal stem "gift" as opposed to a verbal stem "give".
But yes, it appears to be a fundamentally similar name. There are more; Jonathan combines the explicit YHWH reference with the verbal stem of Nathaniel.
https://www.behindthename.com/name/nathanael
https://www.behindthename.com/name/matthew
Not sure what data source it uses, but I suggest double checking before deciding a baby name.
We experimented with sign-language for a while, for our child, and he understood a few gestures at a very young age.
Similarly he understood words like "walk", "bed", and "food" in two languages while very young.
USA has a problem of names with terrible non standard spellings.
One of the Freakonomics books explaind how trashy names make a child's life miserable. Even reduce job prospects.