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.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
February 11, 2026 @ 4:40 am
@ Laura Moreland —
My high school was a small rural central school about an hour’s drive west of Schenectady, NY. Mrs. Peterdy (if I am recalling the spelling correctly) escaped from Hungary in 1956. She was the child of college professors and spoke half a dozen languages, but she was not a young woman when she was teaching us. English was the last one she learned, late in life, and to this day, when I hear English with a strong Eastern European accent, my first impulse is to reply in French.
ajay said,
February 11, 2026 @ 4:52 am
Why does it appear to be a U.S. phenomenon? (Students commenting from the U.K. and other countries say they are not renamed in foreign language classes.)
This happened in foreign language classes in at least one school in the UK in the 1990s, to my personal knowledge.
Gwenaëlle Leon said,
February 11, 2026 @ 5:11 am
My new chinese teacher spent half of the first class assigning Chinese names to the students. She has strong opinions about them, even for people who already had a chosen name, she changed it to a more "elegant" one (which they didn't appreciate). I was surprised by how much gender stereotyping she put into the names: flower names and delicate adjectives for women, and strong adjectives for men.
Jenny Chu said,
February 11, 2026 @ 5:20 am
I've been renamed by teachers in a variety of locations around the world – in Russian by my Russian teacher (a Leningrad native) … in Polish by my Polish contemporaries in that country, who couldn't imagine pronouncing my foreign name … in Vietnamese by my Vietnamese teacher (who was located in Poland) … and in Chinese by my Cantonese teacher in Hong Kong.
One time I filled out a job application for a government job and they asked if I'd ever been known by another name, or had nicknames by which people might have known me (presumably for a security check). I had to list half a dozen different names, several of which were not written in the Roman alphabet. I did not get the job.
Philip Taylor said,
February 11, 2026 @ 5:33 am
« […] a name that's on everyone's lips this week: "Bunny" ». Totally confused — I have only encountered the name "Bunny" for a human twice in my life — one in the case of Charles E. "Bunny" Morgan, my former boss, and quite recently Gary "Bunny" Warren, the catering manager at Bodmin Bowls Club. Since neither of these have (so far as I know) achieved world fame, why might the name "Bunny" be on everyone's lips this week ?
Victor Mair said,
February 11, 2026 @ 7:16 am
I've known two gentlemen (businessmen) who called their wife "Bunny" for their softness, cuddliness, and….
Jerry Packard said,
February 11, 2026 @ 8:10 am
“My high school was a small rural central school about an hour’s drive west of Schenectady, NY”
That must be very close to where I grew up in Pittsfield, MA.
David Marjanović said,
February 11, 2026 @ 8:24 am
It's not a strictly US phenomenon, but may be much more common there than elsewhere. We (1990s, Austria) were renamed in (I think) two classes, both times explicitly explained as meant to save us from having to switch sound systems mid-sentence. Never in Latin class, where we didn't address each other, of course.
Bad Bunny, world-famous in America.
David Marjanović said,
February 11, 2026 @ 8:38 am
Powidl. I think it even exists as a last name…
David said,
February 11, 2026 @ 9:25 am
In Hebrew class I was assigned a new name by my teacher (Qatsir). I pointed out that my name already *was* Hebrew, in fact as quintessentially Hebrew as they come. He still insisted I change it, much to my annoyance. I suppose the idea was that, in learning a new language, you are learning to take on a new communicative identity and having a new name can help facilitate that identity shift. I still thought it was quite silly as I would never use my "new name" anywhere outside of the class.
F said,
February 11, 2026 @ 9:42 am
@DM — this table suggests not only in America, though admittedly other continents might not be as invested in the Superbowl halftime show.
Philip Taylor said,
February 11, 2026 @ 10:08 am
"world-famous in America" — I wish I'd said that — "You will, Philip, you will …".
John Maline said,
February 11, 2026 @ 10:17 am
A Dallas casual Mexican restaurant, Ventana, used Spanish given names instead of numbers to notify customers when their order was available at the pickup window. You got a little card with a random name, irrespective of gender appropriateness. For the duration of your wait for that taco platter, you were Berta, Pablo or whatever instead of order 97. I found it delightful.
Maybe other customers were less excited. If I’m remembering right they’ve since switched to numbers.
Robert Coren said,
February 11, 2026 @ 10:38 am
My 9th-grade French teacher used French names for all of us, sometimes being little creative about it – Stanley was Étienne, Randy was Renaud, I was "Robert le Roux" (red-headed) to distinguish me from classmate Robert Friend, who was "Robert l'Ami" – but I can't remember if any of my other French teachers did so.
Neil Kubler said,
February 11, 2026 @ 10:55 am
There are a number of good reasons for assigning students Chinese names in the Mandarin classroom: (1) it helps maintain an "all in Chinese" atmosphere in the class and thus is conducive to improved learning; (2) it prepares students for interacting with native speakers in Chinese-speaking communities, where foreigners are expected to have Chinese names and where monolingual Chinese speakers couldn't deal with foreign names; (3) for some students, using a different name and assuming a new "persona" can help them lose self-consciousness and dare to speak in (and, of course, sometimes make mistakes in) the language being learned; (4) using Chinese names when speaking Chinese, rather than English names pronounced in English, reflects the linguistic reality that a language normally has only one phonemic system and a speaker normally doesn't toggle back and forth between systems while speaking the same language (occasionally, at least for a time, a language may have "coexistent phonemic systems," but this is not typical).
Lynette Mayman said,
February 11, 2026 @ 11:02 am
I gave my high school French and Latin students lists of names that they could choose from. The idea was to work on pronunciation. I went for the more unusual, old-fashioned or famous names. Students could go for a version of their own name if they wanted, and they all seemed to enjoy the process of taking on a new personality. Some of the students called each other by their new name outside the class fo their high school years.
Lynette Mayman said,
February 11, 2026 @ 11:03 am
I gave my high school French and Latin students lists of names that they could choose from. The idea was to work on pronunciation. I went for the more unusual, old-fashioned or famous names. Students could go for a version of their own name if they wanted, and they all seemed to enjoy the process of taking on a new personality. Some of the students called each other by their new name outside the class for their high school years.
Philip Taylor said,
February 11, 2026 @ 11:09 am
Although my name remained unaltered at school despite studying both French and Latin, I do recall that when I took conversational French lessons after starting work (French was, at that time, the language of international telegraphy) my French tutor, Mme. Strasbourg, always addressed a friend, Terry Begent, as M. /beɪ ˈʒɑ̃/.
VVOV said,
February 11, 2026 @ 11:24 am
To address the specific example in the Reddit thread: my question is whether there any Spanish-speaking country or speech community where a person with the initials “J.P.” would commonly be addressed as “Jota Pe”?
It sounds very odd to me as a person mainly exposed to Mexican and US Spanish, and I agree with the people in the thread saying that “Juan Pablo” is a more natural sounding translation/localization, but perhaps things are different elsewhere in the Hispanophone world?
VVOV said,
February 11, 2026 @ 11:29 am
And re: Bad Bunny being “world famous in America” – his Super Bowl performance culminated in a nod to the differing meanings of “America” in English/Spanish, whereby he proclaimed “God Bless America” followed by reciting the names of all the countries in the Americas, accompanied by backup dancers bearing their national flags.
Philip Taylor said,
February 11, 2026 @ 12:16 pm
Oops, I now realise that that should have read "Mme Strasbourg" (no final period).
katarina said,
February 11, 2026 @ 1:26 pm
My teen-age half-brother had come from China to join our family in Taiwan because of the Communists and his own mother had become indigent. He was a very poor student and spent most of his time at home scribbling and drawing. One day the mailman threw a letter over our gate. I went to pick it up, saw it addressed to Phonto Montalban, and called to the mailman: "Wait, this letter isn't ours!" My half-brother rushed out shouting: "It's mine !" He had changed his name Hongdao to Phonto, and and had added Montalban because his favorite movie actor was Ricardo Montalban. Montalban appeared in movies with Esther Williams and Van Johnson. The letter contained a check from a Hong Kong Chinese newspaper which had received a short story from him. Perhaps I should add that, though a poor student who also failed college, he later reinvented himself and became a millionaire in Taiwan. We other siblings who shone in school went on to earn respectable academic salaries.
Kate Bunting said,
February 11, 2026 @ 1:37 pm
I remember our class being taught to introduce ourselves in French with a French version of our names – but when we got a different French teacher the next year, she said "That's silly, when it isn't your name". However, when I later spent a year in Francophone Switzerland I was addressed as Katherine (with the French pronunciation) because the locals couldn't say Kate!
There are two fairly well-known (female) Bunnies in the UK, both apparently childhood nicknames – gardening expert Bunny Guinness and antiques expert Bunny Campione.
Christian Weisgerber said,
February 11, 2026 @ 1:51 pm
Back in 1981, in my very first EFL school lesson in Germany, the teacher assigned each student an arbitrary English name. I was "Tom". Fifth-grade me was bewildered because I barely understood what was going on—the teacher only spoke English to us during this first lesson—and the purpose eluded me. Nobody grew attached to their English name and they quickly faded out of use after a few lessons.
No names were assigned in subsequent years in French and Russian classes.
Mark Hansell said,
February 11, 2026 @ 2:19 pm
For all the reasons that Neil Kubler laid out, I spent a lot of time and effort giving my Mandarin students culturally appropriate names that matched their original names well. (Excluding Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and heritage speakers who already had hanzi-written names). I asked them first if their names had any particular meaning in any language, and if they wanted their Chinese names to convey that meaning of be strictly phonetically matched (some did, some didn't.) I tried particularly hard to match surnames semantically to common Chinese surnames, for example King (and Koenig, and Reyes) would become 王, White (and Leblanc and Blanco and Weiss) were 白, etc.
My proudest accomplishment in name-giving was for a student with the Swedish surname Lindstrom ('forest'+'stream'), who I gave the name 林溪, which works both semantically and (kind of ) phonetically.
J.W. Brewer said,
February 11, 2026 @ 6:02 pm
In US schools I acquired a German name for German class starting in 1979 and a Latin name for Latin class starting in 1981. I think we chose our own with teacherly oversight and you could pick one that was not the equivalent of you "regular" name even if the target language had one or you could go with the equivalent if available. It seemed very normal and uncontroversial at the time. I guess you could have had disputes about equivalents. E.g., my friend Steve was Septimus in Latin class and I can imagine our teacher potentially being persnickety about whether Stephanus was a "real" Latin name versus a foreign one that arrived with Christianization somewhat later than the theoretical time-setting of our lessons. And of course when I subsequently spent time in West Germany as an exchange student I used my normal "American" name rather than my German-class name, which would have seemed weird. It wasn't a name for interacting with actual Germans with – it was a name for interacting with other American kids who were also learning German as an L2.
Neither my German teacher nor my Latin teacher were native speakers of the language they taught, FWIW. And neither of our teachers themselves had "foreign" names other than Frau X and Magistra Y, but of course we did not address our teachers by their given names in any of the classes conducted entirely in English.
When I started Classical Greek in college, however, no parallel custom was observed. Nor was it observed for Old Norse. I guess we were comfortable in that context with a self-understanding as Anglophones attempting to acquire only reading proficiency in a dead language.
Jonathan Smith said,
February 11, 2026 @ 7:09 pm
To give an alternative view re: Chinese: just as there is a good argument for e.g. Ma3 Zhen1 not becoming e.g. Jane just because Anglosphere, there is likewise a good argument for Jane not becoming (Ma) Zhen1 because Sinosphere. Argument being that declining to adapt creates cognitive dissonance and sometimes downright annoyance for others, which builds character. And do note — not to be that guy — that Jane > Zhen and the like parallel the renaming processes that contribute to the cultural steamrolling of (erstwhile) borderlands. So I personally quit renaming unless someone wants.
There is an even better argument that e.g. (Tw.) Chhoà / (Mand.) Cài and all the rest aren't "the same name" and shouldn't be "auto-converted" just because Chinese characters. This parallels a European (and other) situation: is e.g. "Leo" one name "read" differently in different places… or different names such that Spanish Leo in the US can remain [ˈle.o] not [ˈliəʊ]? Trend is towards "remain", which seems positive to the extent it's compatible with loanword principles considered in previous threads…