Student names in language classes
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From Barbars Phillips Long:
A Reddit thread beginning with a complaint from a student taking Spanish at a U.S. high school hinges on whether the teacher should call the student by his preferred name in English or translate it into Spanish. I never really thought about the practice of using or assigning Spanish names in Spanish class, or French names in French class, even though I did not have a French name in French class (possibly because my junior high French teacher was Puerto Rican and my high school teacher was a Hungarian refugee who had studied at the Sorbonne). But since I was in high school in the 1960s, sensitivity about names, naming, pronunciation of names, "dead names," and other assorted naming issues are a much more prominent part of advice/grievance columns and forums.
Most of my Chinese students have English names which, in many cases, they adopted or were granted already in elementary school, middle school, or high school, and over the years became quite fond of their English name. A minority staunchly cling to their Chinese names, and would consider it a betrayal of their ethnicity to switch to a foreign name. Quite a few tell me that they switch to an English name because their teachers and classmates can't pronounce their Chinese names. I should also mention that a large proportion of foreigners studying Chinese languages think it's cool to take a Chinese name, makes them feel more Chinese, and they stick to their Chinese for their whole life. Often, one of the first things teachers of first-year Chinese do is endow their students with a Chinese name, which many of the students think imparts a Chinese personality / character to them. My name, for example Méi Wéihéng 梅維恒 ("Plum Preserve / Maintain / Safeguard Constant / Unchanging / Immutable"), thoughtfully bestowed upon me by Tang Haitao and Yuan Naiying, gifted Princeton teachers, corresponds well with the sound and meaning of my name.
Far fewer of my Japanese students adopt an English name, perhaps because Japanese names seem easier to pronounce than Chinese names (vowels and consonants are straightforward, no tones to contend with, can spell them readily in romaji, etc.)
Selected readings
- "A confusion of languages and names" (7/8/16)
- "War on foreign names in China" (6/22/19)
jhh said,
February 10, 2026 @ 9:10 pm
When teaching Japanese language in an American college, we always rendered the student's family name into katakana pronunciation… the logic was that they would often be called exactly that when they went to Japan, and they needed to get used to hearing their name with that kind of pronunciation. I don't recall anybody getting upset by that practice, but maybe they just hid it well.
(Yes, I'll grant that some American students in Japan are addressed by a katakana version of English given names, but outside family settings, use of family names is also very common.)
Jonathan Smith said,
February 10, 2026 @ 9:52 pm
One first day here in USofA I pronounced a student's Chinese Zh- surname a la standard Mandarin, and they said "we say it [with no retroflexion]." But I proved myself no better than ur regular Chinese teacher in being nonetheless constitutionally compelled to render it standardly as opposed to [e.g.] "Zang1 Li4"… it is hard to imagine how ur regular Chinese teacher would even cope with such a request were it insisted upon.
John Chew said,
February 10, 2026 @ 10:23 pm
My high school Latin teacher in 1970s Canada would address me as John in English, but Johannes in Latin; I think my French teachers did likewise, but they could just have been leaning into their accents.
As an adult, I don't think I've had any Spanish-speaking friends call me anything other than "Juan" or "Juanito". A Thai friend once asked me while I was studying a little of his language if he could call me "Jorun" instead, because "John" was such a weird thing to call a human being. No such problem when visiting Japan though, even as a child, because they distinguish ジョンさん (John-san) and ジョン君 (John-kun) as human names from a common name for a dog, ジョン (Jo(h)n).
Chips Mackinolty said,
February 10, 2026 @ 10:56 pm
Back in 1966 at a London comprehensive, Latin was compulsory for the first year of secondary school. Like virtually all the other teachers, the Latin teacher refused to address me by my given name (bloody Poms!). So I got my second name, rendered as Georgius (with hard "g"s).
Most of my teachers called me George, and then got cross if I didn't answer them. Why should I? It had never been a name I responded to in my life!
Scott P. said,
February 10, 2026 @ 11:10 pm
In high school German we each picked a German name and that name was used throughout all the years of instruction.
Michael Watts said,
February 10, 2026 @ 11:28 pm
Chinese people with any exposure to English are expected to have an English name. That includes taking classes in English, but it also includes anyone in an English-speaking workplace. I believe it may include people who work in international firms even if the language of the workplace is Mandarin.
(The expectation is reciprocal; if you do any interaction in Chinese they will feel you should have a Chinese name.)
There r 2 ways 2 interpret ur anecdote. Did the student want you to pronounce their surname with /z/ (common for Chinese families in America if they're English monoglots, and possibly even if not) or with /ts/ (as someone from the south of China might pronounce the Mandarin phoneme)?
I would guess that you meant /z/, because as you note the standard practice in China is that people will pronounce your name according to their own natural pronunciation of its characters, so e.g. a guy from Guangdong would have no expectation that Mandarin speakers from farther north would avoid pronouncing 张 the same way when referring to him that they do when referring to sheets of paper.
Chinese "zh-" in American English seems to have standardized on /z/ as far as I can tell; there is a Youtuber called "Aaron 'Cybertron' Zheng" [zɛŋ], and there is a League of Legends character called "Xin Zhao" 赵信 [zɪn zaʊ].
In Spanish and French classes I was always called Miguel or Michel, translating my name. My Latin teacher did have all of his students choose Latin names, but that was fairly meaningless: we chose only single names, presumably approximating a Latin cognomen, and the class never involved addressing anyone, or speaking in Latin to anyone, so the names were never actually used.
I'm a little surprised that a Latin teacher would use the name "Johannes". The Greek name has no /h/, and as far as I can tell the Latinized name didn't develop an "h" until the phoneme /h/ had vanished?
(Wiktionary takes the interesting approach of providing a Classical Latin pronunciation for "Johannes" at the same time that it notes that spelling was introduced in Late Latin.)
I did take a Chinese class that insisted on Chinese names for all students. We were free to pick our own names and in general Western names don't have Chinese cognates. (They do have conventionalized transcriptions.) I used 瓦麦克, which combines a kind of translation of my surname [瓦 is the electrical unit] with a conventional transcription of "Michael". I got objections from various Chinese people; nobody minded 麦克, but there was a feeling that 瓦 was inappropriate for a surname. I was told that I should have used 沃.
Richard Warmington said,
February 10, 2026 @ 11:45 pm
Quite a few Japanese given names function seamlessly in an English-speaking environment: Ken, Naomi, Erika, Mari, and others.
John Rohsenow said,
February 11, 2026 @ 12:29 am
When my wife was teaching English in a small college in Taiwan in the late '60s
the students were all required to choose "English names" (possibly for the convenience of their non-Chinese spkg teachers?). In addition to the usual assortment of Sylvester's and Daisy's and one "Flossie" (initially spelled as "Floosie"(sic)), there were Hitler and Stalin Chen, and one young man who signed himself "Stiff Wang". With some trepidation she inquired after class how he had chosen his name? He replied innocently that it was after the famous American movie star who had recently been in Taiwan making the famous film THE SAND PEBBLES, Stiff McQueen.
Laura Morland said,
February 11, 2026 @ 12:40 am
@ Barbara Phillips Long,
I am so curious about one detail of your narrative, because my high school French teacher was also a Hungarian refugee who had also spent time at the Sorbonne. Could you possibly have attended Bartram School?
I thought of Madame Lashley instantly, because although she was not in the habit of "renaming" students, she chose to do so with one classmate of mine, who went by a name that's on everyone's lips this week: "Bunny."
She called her "Lapin."
Chas Belov said,
February 11, 2026 @ 12:58 am
My junior high school Spanish teacher, Mrs. Smedley, did assign us Spanish names, and I happily accepted Carlos (for Charles, which Chas is short for). I do use it on rare occasion where I'm ordering at a fast casual in Spanish and they ask for my name so they can call it when my order is ready.
I chose my Chinese name, 白力漢 (Cantonese: Baahk Lihk Hōn, Mandarin: Bái Lì Hàn) with the help of friends, before I began my Cantonese studies. I went for a translation of my "English" name rather than with a transcription so I didn't have to worry about which kind of Chinese it was being said in. I used it in my Cantonese class.
John Swindle said,
February 11, 2026 @ 1:17 am
People are touchy about names. I think I may have been called Johannes in a beginning German class in high school in the USA, but my mother's family often called me that or a diminuitive of it anyway. My beginning Chinese language teacher at university assigned Chinese names to all of us, but one American classmate insisted that his name, English or Chinese or otherwise, was Scott. Anything else was as bad as pinyin or simplified characters.