What's in a name? Quite a lot

LinkedIn appears to have jumped on the ‘diversity acknowledgement’ bandwagon that’s been sweeping across the Western world in recent weeks. I was drowsily scrolling through my LinkedIn profile on Friday morning (because that’s the first thing I do most mornings in my happening life) and saw that there was now an option to add an audio pronunciation of your name to your profile. It’s free, and quite a decent initiative so I bit the bullet and added mine to my profile. Not sure how much this is going to change, but this is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit, so here’s a blog post about it.

My first name is extremely common in my generation in India, while my last name is not. So, over my life, I’ve become accustomed to my last name being mispronounced, sometimes unintentionally but often intentionally as well, since it also happens to be an actual word and to my misfortune, can be formulated into annoying nicknames. The way I tend to pronounce it as well is not even the actual correct way of pronouncing it, so I don’t really blame others if they get it wrong. Getting the pronunciation of my first name butchered though, was a completely new ball game, which, while I anticipated happening when we moved to Canada 2 years ago, was still not entirely prepared for. I’ve lived abroad before, but that was in Dubai, where a) a lot of the ex-pat population is Indian/South Asian, so it wasn’t mispronounced as often and b) I don’t think I cared or paid much attention to it when it was because it was so rare. Yes, there was the occasional having to spell out my name at Starbucks, but doesn’t everyone go through that? Even you, John. I digress, but this did lead to a funny incident when I moved back to India from Dubai when I confidently spelled out my name to the confused barista, who wondered why I did so when everyone in India knows how to spell ‘Varun’. But anyway, back to the main point of this rant.

It’s 2 syllables, how hard can it be? Va-Run. It’s not one syllable, and is not the sound a car makes with an ‘n’ at the end instead of an 'm'. It’s also not ‘va-RUN’ even though that would be hilarious as ‘Va-RUN JOG’ wouldn’t it? Ha ha ha! Sigh. It’s also not ‘way-run’ or ‘V.A. Run’ which would be a pretty cool name. I thought about this and ways to get people to pronounce it correctly, and realized that the sound of the ‘u’ in my name doesn’t really exist in the English language. So it’s often pronounced as the ‘U’ in ‘Umbrella’ when it should actually be pronounced like the ‘U’ in how a person from the North of England would pronounce ‘Up’ for instance. That’s it, maybe I should move to the North of England then.

I do appreciate it when people make the effort of asking me how it’s pronounced, and then try their best before giving up. Especially since I make a conscious effort to learn how a person’s name is pronounced, either by asking them, or Googling it, or even asking someone who’s interacted with them before. I think it’s a basic sign of respect and courtesy, and shows the other person that you care about them. No one is expected to know how to pronounce every name correctly, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, and there’s no need to be embarrassed, I’d, in fact, find it more embarrassing if I got it wrong! It’s not the fact that it’s mispronounced that annoys me as much as the double standards associated with it. From what I’ve seen and experienced, and I’m speaking with a very limited sample size in mind, I’ve been laughed at, and have also laughed at fellow Indians when I’ve got the pronunciation of a ‘Western’ name wrong. There also appears to be an expectation of having to make the effort to know how to pronounce a name. I don’t see the same expectation the other way around. Our names are regularly butchered, and I’ve rarely heard an Indian name pronounced correctly by someone from the ‘Western world’. It’s like that isn’t even an expectation, it’s like ‘Oh my name is too difficult for you, thank you so much for trying, omg it’s so cute the way you try and pronounce it, here let me make it easier for you so you don’t stop talking to me just because my name is weird’. Why? If my name is alien to you, chances are I haven’t met many people with your first name either growing up in India.

It’s even gone as far as people suggesting I change my name to a more Western-sounding name to better my chances of getting a job. Seriously? It’s my name, and it’s my identity, why should I change that just because you can’t digest the fact that people from different cultural backgrounds have names that don’t sound like the ones you’re used to? And (this is something I read in a LinkedIn post), this is not something that people with Western-sounding names are expected to do when they live in other parts of the world such as the Middle East and South-East Asia for example, where their names are just as foreign.

Things can’t change overnight, and steps like the one taken by LinkedIn are an important first step. I know I’m now much more likely to go to someone’s profile before meeting or speaking with them even if I’m sure of how their name is pronounced, and I hope people afford me the same basic level of respect by doing the same for me.

Thank you for reading!