Our app is designed to be used across the Asia Pacific.
We have members who follow western naming conventions as well as members following common asian naming conventions.
Turns out there can be alot of variation on what is the convention.
https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/a-guide-to-using...
How would you handle different naming conventions, so users see their name in the order they would like?
Family, Given
Given, Family
Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth
SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name.
Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (given name only)
Malaysian name: Sharifah Azizah binti Syed Ahmad Tarmizi, (honorific surname: Sharifah) (given name: Azizah) (patronym) (father's honorific surname: Syed) (father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi)
> "Use single or multiple fields depending on your user’s needs. Not everyone’s name fits the first-name, last-name format. Using multiple name fields mean there’s more risk that a person’s name will not fit the format you’ve chosen and that it is entered incorrectly."
and
> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do."
and
> "If your service stores personal information, you should allow users to update their details, including their name. Allowing users to change their name helps your service respect their personal identity. It also means they can continue using your service without having to start over. People change their name for many reasons. For example, because of a change in marital status, family situation or gender. Avoid making it hard for users to change their name. As well as causing them distress, it may make them reluctant to use your service."
[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/names/
I'm always a bit surprised when I see some e.g. tech conferences still insisting on title as a mandatory field (or really asking at all). It's not just the gender and the marital status but some people attach a lot of significance to all manner of honorifics.
When I last registered for some conference put on by The Economist, it must have had 25 titles to choose from including a whole bunch of aristocratic and clergy-related titles.
Seems a lot easier just not to bother today.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/titles-included-i...
My personal favourite is if you change your first name to “Sir” and you are not actually a “Knight”, then you get the note “THE REFERENCE TO SIR IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE” printed in your passport.
Context: I wanted “Dr.” to be added to my passport.
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This is the way to go.
"The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here."
It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.
The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.
In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.
Some additional observations from the German-speaking world (both Vienna and rural Austria):
- yes, we also often refer to people, even in everyday speech, as LastName FirstName
- often when referring to someone by name they are also given a definite article (equivalent of English "the"), e.g. "die Maria" or "der Gruber Hansi"
- some people I've encountered with a background in the German aristocracy (not Austrian, where such titles are technically abolished) have extremely long legal names with multiple prince/duke/von X und Y etc clauses. This will be their full legal name that appears in the passport and must be used when booking flights etc, but is not what they would use as "full name" in an everyday business context. So "Full Name" might not always be "Legal Name".
Also in a South Asian/Indian diaspora context, it is very common for people to be addressed by a semi-formal nickname that does not appear anywhere in their legal name. Come to think of it, I know one or two Austrian aristos* who use the same approach.
* yes, technically the aristocracy is abolished but they still live in their castles and know each other's pedigrees...
But those informal regional order conventions? I read them as formalized disrespect for the individual: "you're not Hans who happens to be a Müller, you're a Müller who happens to be Hans. And the Müllers, they are part of us, so subsume!" Those regional things can be quite peculiar: a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her family took over, at some point between the thirty years war and the industrial revolution.
> This is the way to go.
Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?
It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.
In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.
Consider the name of a famous violinist, Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman Radhakrishnan, also known as Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan. From a Western perspective, 'Lalgudi' isn't strictly a 'name' per se: it is a toponymic surname, and is the name of a taluk (or administrative subdivision: it is a third-order division after state, and district) in Tamil Nadu.
Gopala is an avonymic, i.e. his grandfather's name, and Jayaraman is a patronymic, his father's name. His given name is Radhakrishnan, but frequently rendered as Krishnan.
Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?) As a result, most will write their romanized family name in all uppercase. Then, it can easily be identified as first or last. The easiest place to see it is in movie credits. When the screen is full of romanized Korean names, you see a mix of family name in all upper as first or last.
South Indian names can be incredibly long. Many people will shorten to use a single character from either first or last name.
Just have a single free text field. That should work for all cultures. Allow for 64 chars minimum (hello Spaniards!) and possibly 128 chars. Also, you might try a second field for "nick name". Lots of people with very long names use a shorter form in less formal settings.
In Korean, the family name comes first, then the given name. (There are no middle names.) It is almost always a single-character surname (Kim, Lee, etc.) and a two-character given name, though there are exceptions, with a small minority of surnames being two characters, and a small minority of given names being one character.
Romanization rules have changed over the years. The first president of the modern Republic of Korea was Syngman Rhee, with his given name Syngman first (with no spaces or hyphens) and family name Rhee last. Then take Park Chung Hee, the third president, in office in the 60s and 70s; his family name is Park, and his given name is Chung Hee. A few presidents later, you have Roh Tae-woo, in office around the 90s, with family name Roh and given name Tae-woo; notice the hyphenation. The current president is Yoon Suk Yeul, back to not having a hyphen to join the two characters of his given name.
Sometimes it depends on when it was that someone was first issued a passport, because the government is loathe to change the way someone's romanized name is spelled after the first issuance.
A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal. Using the full name feels off.
In my case, it was to address a resignation notice, so it was a bit of a nitpick with no legal consequences. However in other cultures and scenarios it can matter a lot more.
So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree the app is localized.
It's a minefield!
An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.
So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.
Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.
No it doesn't. Just ask how they want to be addressed. You can't encode all the possible variants, not everyone in Germany will want to be addressed in that way even if they are both a woman and a doctor.
This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.
If I sign up for an account, but the invoice is going to the billing department of my company, why do you care what my real name is?
Because the billing department verifies bills before paying them, and needs to know who to ask about the bill?
Otherwise there should be not a lot of reasons to parse and format Asian names, as suggested plenty times over here. If the incoming invoice has to go through legal checks first, the requirement shall be as codified and supplied, whether it's that the name shall be written back to front or in purple on red.
Maybe I'm just overthinking, likely I am.
There are plenty of situations where you need their full legal name as per passport or other form of identification. In here it's often some form of anti-money laundering laws. The first time I came across it was for a game show where you could win money, but to take the money out of the app, the law required some legal identification.
"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."
Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated.
Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.
I always feel awkward responding to them, because I don't know if I'm typing `Hello $FIRSTNAME` or `Hello $LASTNAME`.
Introducing a hyphen isn't great: it doesn't match my legal name and it's awkward because some people do have a hyphenated surname plus another surname.
I've also met several people whose legal name doesn't include a surname.
You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames.
So what does it say on your ID?
Your birth certificate if you have no ID?
Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?
I have this problem that some software which doesn't readily discern what should be first name and what should be last name gives me a list of all Johns followed by all Lisas and then Peters, which is less than helpful. Other software thinks it got it right but then for Hungarian names, it gives me all Istváns followed by all Józsefs, which, again, is less than optimal.
Having a "sort key for bloody sorting" field may be a way to go, I personally would use it, but making it user friendly is a bitch, and heuristics will get it wrong more often than not. Sorry but I've run out of nice words for this problem.
(A bibliographer enters the chat, I cower in fear)
I would also mention that I feel your pain to a degree. My wife has an extremely uncommon female name, but the spelling is very close to a common male name. Many times she has run into people "fixing" her name for her without saying anything only for it to cause issues months later, or people calling her by the name they assumed she meant to type. It's incredibly aggravating to deal with. Lots of missed emails. Lots of phone calls of helpful people informing her of the "error".
At times, I wish the entire naming system were replaced with something that had no room for error or miscommunication. Everyone is called Larry or something.
I had a friend with a single letter first name and the booking forms would never accept it, so he would add another couple of letters, but then at the airport he would be fucked because his ticket never matched his ID.
And how did you come by such a name?
So:
* honorific surname: Sharifah * given name: Azizah * father's honorific surname: Syed * father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi * address me as: Zaphod Beeblebrox the 4th
- one "full name" field. (English speakers would use Firstname Lastname) - one "how should we call you?" name. (English speakers would use their first name, in some other cultures people would preferred to be called by their last name)
Either in the format:
- given-name middle-name surname
- surname, given-name (note there is no comma here) middle-name or middle initial
People can write whatever they want, there, in whatever order they want. We only allow 255 characters, though, because we use classic VARCHAR, and index the field.
Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.
I support non-Roman character sets.
Not only.
Argentinian national hero Manuel Belgrano had as full name Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano González.
Chilean painter Pablo Picasso's full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxx...
To clarify the purpose of the two
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Really? Your parents named you the exact same name as a famous politician?
Edit: Really? Downvote me for the OP’s bad English?
The fragment "Hated the name Harry and got it removed" probably means "[He] hated the name Harry and got it removed", not "[I] hated the name Harry and got it removed". The grammar is acceptable in many contexts.
Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names.
Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything?
A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1 and either John Doe or something cute as default) And a Nickname or Display Name field if your app needs to show something on screen.
Nom d'usage technically has no legal value, it's just a last name you might want to be addressed as, normally that of your husband but it can be a pen name and whatever. It's optional, and technically only at the request of the relevant person. Men can have nom d'usage too (égalité, after all).
Still, immigration offices, banks, insurances... they often slap the husband's last name if that field is left empty, just because. Why would you want something else, right? She probably forgot!
We started crossing those fields to make it clear she doesn't want a nom d'usage.
Most people never need to think about the details of how names might work in a different culture across the world, let alone work that into any kind of a rule-based mechanism or a rigid information model. If some random person working at a construction site in Europe or the US has no idea that first names and last names aren't a universal thing, that has exactly zero direct effect on anything. In most cases that's probably even true of lawyers or other high-level white collar work.
I'm actually inclined to believe lots of programmers know more about e.g. time [1] than a non-programmer Joe Random does on average, exactly because software developers may actually end up coming across at least some of those issues.
[1] e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
[1] If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.
It's just not that hard to find problems with name inputs.
* Full name (John Smith)
* Index name (Smith, John) - mostly for meatspace compatibility.
* Preferred name (John Smith) - used in lists with other people's names
* Personal name (John) - used in direct communications
Then there is the difference between the "full" name and the legal full name, with all names spelled out. The latter is sometimes necessary, but it can be awkward or inappropriate to use it in most places that expect a full name.
And maybe it's just me but
>because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.
isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.
>isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.
What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity?
That made me laugh out loud. It's a great reminder why being conscious of the assumptions you make is an important part of development and one that LLMs can't really do.
More people designing applications need to read it.
https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub/sevis-basics...
>People have exactly one canonical full name.
What is on your passport then?
Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.
In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.
add:
To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.
Also, a lot of people in the world don't have passports.
In Ireland, it’s not entirely rare to use different forms of one’s name in Irish and English.
For example, in English our president would be called “ Michael Daniel Higgins”, but in Irish “Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn”, and while there’s obviously a correspondence between them, they are pronounced quite differently.
It’s possible to change the version of the name you use on your passport after six months of regular use (compared to two years for any other kind of name change), and in that situation both forms of your name will be listed on your passport.
See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.
For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.
I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.
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[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10528
But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.
Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.
But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"
Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".
Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.
Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.
Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.
For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.
Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.
And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.
It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).
There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).
There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.
There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.
Finally there are people who go by a name which is not part of their legal name at all. Short forms like Bob instead of Robert, but also freeform names for various reasons, perhaps the most sensitive being that some government official may have determined their legal name contrary to their own wishes. Imagine your mother named you Sue but someone decided that must be short for Susan and put that on your government documents.
Related: when people want to show which part of their name is the family name, they either make it all uppercase or underline it. You can see this on some CVs but it happens elsewhere too when a full name is going to be read by people who don't know the addressee.
Is there a similar sentiment among older people in parts of Asia?
Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain.
German companies often spend a non-trivial amount on software engineering time and data cleanup to get these things right. And the French take it even more seriously.
Non-native speakers may not understand it, but that's no excuse and you will alienate people and customers. Even younger generations notice.
And just fyi I'm a millennial and per "Du" with everyone I know. Not my telco provider though.
It’s not uncommon in the west either and it’s weird how much we ignored it in software e.g. “I’m John Q. Smith the Third but call me John” or “May I call you j-dog?”
> There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.
There’s also the issue of honorifics which you usually can’t get from names alone, as well as titles (whether professional or nobility) which can be very important to people’s identity.
In India there are patronymic names with initials, mononyms (no “family name” or initials), names with just a given name (one or multiple words) and no “family name”, names where the “last name” is a place, etc.
If you truly want to cater to all kinds, just have one field for name and another for what they’d like to be addressed as.
[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
I happen to be handing that data over to airlines, which has some of the less forgiving, yet fragmented name requirements. If you handle this incorrectly, your customer can't fly, even after they paid for the flight. And for those who say that this doesn't matter as much: It absolutely does. People do get confused by this more frequently than you think. I've seen people losing an entire trip that they saved for, all because of unclear naming requirements.
The way I deal with this is to provide a country and locale specific name fields. You don't have to detect the geolocation or track the user for this, just let them choose whatever locale setting they want, and give them the "sensible" layout. Here are some examples:
- In Vietnam, we use last name then first name.
- In Indonesia, we use first name, then last name, but also give an option to declare that the person doesn't have a last name.
- In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.
Even when you've handled the layout convention carefully, the 3rd party you're handing the data to, if one exists, might not give the same care and attention that you do. In my case: some airlines just haven't gotten around the idea that some people simply don't have last names. When a person with a single name wants to fly, airlines want the customer to use the name for both first and last name (e.g. If the person's name is David, then the airline expects "David David"). If you require First Name and Last Name as the input, and don't elaborate on how to fill them, the customer might simply fill the last name with a dot (".") character. The airlines / any other 3rd party won't accept that. For this, I suggest to detail out the ways in which you handle the data and go talk to your providers, if any.
All in all, it's a pretty tough challenge, and the wisdom around this isn't going to fit inside a single HN post. I do commend you for actually thinking about this problem. Good Luck.
I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so on. Often I can’t even determine if they have my name correct in their records – it could be recorded correctly but used incorrectly, or it could be recorded incorrectly and used correctly. Sometimes I suspect it’s recorded incorrectly but also used incorrectly in a different way.
Normally it’s not a problem, but like you say, airline tickets can cause issues. I think I’ve been demoted from “check in online” to “check in at a counter because we need to check your paperwork” a bunch of times because my passport doesn’t match my name on my ticket. Often it’s not even the name order – the airline will only sell my ticket with a first name and last name field (meaning I have to drop my middle name, which is on my passport) or they ask for all three and then concatenate first and middle with no space and truncate the last few letters.
Everything would be so much easier if I could just enter my name.
I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and middle mashed together, and middle lowercased). That of course doesn't match my ID, but I've never had a problem traveling, even when I sometimes leave out my middle name entirely. (I guess I get less scrutiny most places since I'm an American white male.)
Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...
Or just having a preferred name and full name, duplicating data but probably it wouldn't be a big deal in most cases.
This would be a nice GitHub project for someone to showcase name inputs in all languages.
How do you handle this when passing the data to the airlines?
Not to forget the special case that people may only have one name (for which some immigration offices had to invent the rule to repeat the single name twice, as first and last name, to comply with online and offline forms that have these often mandatory fields). So we may add two patterns to your pattern list:
Localization is tricky, not just for names, e.g. postcodes (GB) and zip codes (US) come after the city ("London SW4 0AF", "Beverly Hill, CA 90210"), in many other places before (e.g. FR, DE, e.g. "91054 Erlangen").As an Asian person, don’t overthink this.
Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two.
Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity.
Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for something that might cause headaches later.
In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.
The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong.
And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outside name (so that ghosts can't follow you home). Or you have your real name and an unofficial English name (for reasons both good & bad) that literally everyone at work calls you.
In the Philippines people have names Anna Katrina Gomez. But you don't call them Anna. You call them Katrina because that's how it often works in the Philippines.
The solution is simple:
One field is "what is your full name?"
One field is "what would you like to be called?"
You don't need to try to infer one from the other.
Naming is a tar pit and even Westerners might like to be called John when their name is Winstonshire. Let’s not even bother.
What is the downside? I’m not seeing it. I see people here recommending to implement logic to handle this fully and I’m not seeing why this would be preferable.
My name is Ritobrata Ghosh (Given Family). But my friends, teachers, colleagues always called me Rito. I have a different short name that is used by immediate family and close relatives.
Rito is also easier for western people's tongues. So, that is what I almost always use. I use my full name only in legal and financial documents. In every other place, I am just Rito. I like to be addressed as "Rito" and appear as "Rito Ghosh" in badges, documentation, slack, any non-legal/non-financial documents.
So, the best way to go, in my opinion, is having two fields- one for full name, another for preferred name. Do not _assume_ anything.
This is also consistent with western names, like: William Henry Gates III as Bill Gates.
There is also another field in many places where there are badges and such. "This field will appear as is in your badge" is wise in such cases.
Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identification has both name orders, and both are correct.
Names are awful.
Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.
Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.
Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."
Everyone I've known there has their mother's maiden name as a middle name, and father's last as last name. Then on marriage sliding the original last name to the middle name.
But one thing I did notice is that very few go by any given name, usually a play on it or a nickname instead.
And don't limit it to Asia either, it's relevant everywhere.
So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?
By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.
Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.
Im considering having a select field next to the name something like
Name Order: "Western style", "Eastern style"
or
Name Order: "Given Name, Family Name", "Family name, Given Name"
With a bit of extra work I can detect the country set a default for this field, while allowing users in places like Pakistan to still get the display order they want.
But I've never seen it done this way before, hence my curiosity to ask everyone.
Seriously, just avoid splitting name fields if you can help it. Do you absolutely have to have split names? Begrudgingly do so and acknowledge things will never be right for everyone. But if not, just don’t (and don’t make the mistake of assuming a format in order to do things like surname sorting—with a unified field you simply can’t do surname sorting).
There are plenty of Asian countries that don’t follow last name - first name so it’s not necessarily an “eastern” thing.
another opinion from me about automating based on country. It’s a cool thing to implement but might not be worth the effort.
An example I have is in the Philippines, majority of people go First Name Last Name. However, there’s a Chinese sub population that has last name first name. But then most of this sub population also have “Christian” names that they use in Most official documents or websites. I’m pretty sure other countries will also have similar nuances.
Maybe a screen name or username will be the razor.
Example: in Malaysia and Singapore, Chinese people can have traditional Chinese names -- SAA for surname and 2 characters that's their "given name" so to speak. Some have an English name -- but it's written ESAA. Some only have one character names, so it's ESA. Some surnames have 2 characters, so ESSA/ESSAA.
When filling out US forms, ESAA usually turns into Englishname Surname, and SAA turns into Givenname Surname. So the display order for the first is firstlast, but the second is lastfirst. Same country, same culture, different display order depending on whether their parents gave them English names or they chose one later in life.
When there's a middle name field, often ESAA names turns into E AA S - first middle last. This display order is wrong. It should be first last middle.
As you can see, even within the same country, same culture, same neighbourhood, you still don't have a consistent order. It's simply not possible to do this in a consistent way.
It’s more complex than what it seems that I think a razor would work rather than going through all cases.
For instance in China, most names are single character family name followed by a two character given name. Some rare family names are two characters and usually they will have a single character given name. Some people have single character family name and single character given name.
Then you get people from different ethnic groups who put the family name at the end. Often these are characterised by a long given name and then an interpunct joining that with the family name, but that's not always done. For instance a popular singer at the moment has the Chinese name 希林娜依·高 where 高 is a fairly normal Chinese surname so it's easy to identify as such. A very popular actress is named 迪丽热巴·迪力木拉提 so it's not always the case you can easily tell which name is which.
Even for those with simple construction, so the characters are FAB (family name, and 2 characters for given name). You'll find that within a family, where you might expect pet names, it's common instead to call each other by AB, except when they're annoyed and use the full name FAB. In a business context, someone with a higher rank might be F先生 (Mr F), F总 (Manager F), F董 (Director F), but close colleagues might call you AA, BB, 小A, 小B etc - but typically they won't get to choose that, they'll be told by the person "you can call me ___" and they might allow different people to use different names or react with their official title if someone uses too informal a name with them.
I've got Chinese friends who exclusively use an English name at work in China. I've got a friend who later moved to the UK, and most people in the UK know her by her Chinese name, but except for a few close school friends, nobody in her working life in China even knew her real name because the company she worked for only used English names (this isn't very common though).
In other countries, many people don't use their first name much. In the UK, I've known quite a few people who've primarily used their middle name, and others (including me) are generally known by others with a name that isn't among any of their given names. Sometimes these are common transformations, e.g. David to Dave, David to Dai (in Wales), but other times people just use initials or nicknames (e.g. I've got a friend who pretty everybody calls Danger, it started as a joke with friends, but now even his parents sometimes use it!)
Anyway, that was a long diversion, but it's always safer I think to ask for the full name as one field that not try to change it, but use it exactly as provided for official purposes, and to also ask for a preferred name for your communication with them. In cases were you share the name to other people, e.g. an online community, you might want an additional display name which might well be different again.
Which might be an upside, because there are cultures and contexts where it’s incredibly rude. You’re a glorified ledger, not a family member or life-long friend.
I get a lot of mail from foreign readers. Indians and Pakistanis are pretty formal, and most Africans even more so. On the other hand, some people from those same countries will write stream of consciousness emails that look like a text message to their dad.
The Western countries are a lot less formal, but and frequently drop the polite form which I was raised to use with all strangers.
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