My wife and I decided to have our kid in Portugal so he could get both of our surnames without adding hyphens or changing our own surnames. If we had opted to have him in Germany we would have all had to adopt a single (probably hyphenated) "family name".
There are several issues in real life if you live in a society where it is the norm.
The very least when you have kids and their teachers or any official you encounter assume that the parents have the same name as the kids. (This can't be your kid!)
We know a couple where she had hyphenated surnames. Almost always confused the officials, colleagues and friends when they lived in Switzerland.
We decided against my wife not changing her name, since it was not worth the troubles.
Why do women change their surname at all? In regard to children, using both parents surnames, in whatever order, seems to be fair to everybody.
Please note I’m not advocating for Portuguese or Spanish naming customs per se. I’d like to hear what other HN readers think about this particular option.
"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same."
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.
There are downsides to that. For example, this is how me, my parents and my siblings ended up with different surnames on our passports. They all started as the same surname, but then got mangled independently during translation...
My German last name also contains an ü, so when we emigrated to an English-speaking country and obtained dual-citizenship we used 'ue' for that passport and I now use 'ue' on a day-to-day basis. This also means I have two slightly different legal surnames depending by which passport I go.
IMO the main reason is that your kids bear the father’s last name. Convention has it that kids bear the father‘s name, and this „works better“ if everybody in the family has the same name. I‘m not saying it is good or anything.. but this is the reason why many in my country (Austria) marry before the first child arrives.
In France, in 2004, a law was made to permit joining 2 family names together when parents want their child to have both last names, joined by not one, but two hyphens "--".
This lasted about 5 years before it was reversed. I met someone who had this in her last name and thought she was yanking my chain.
I'm so sorry my country did this.
Here is something in French that mentions the law, I couldn't easily find the original law online:
Small nitpick, if you are* in Germany but have an e.g. Spanish name (e.h. Hector Garcia Gonzalez) then... that's 2 surnames without a dash. I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children, but your example is just the -most basic- version.
*"you are" meaning you'd be a German citizen with a German passport.
Yeah. I have an extended family member who took both names and a friend who opted to just take on his wife's maiden name and dropped his. Another set of friends came up with a last name that was new to them both.
The hyphenating of both names is an interesting concept, but would in all practicality be a difficult thing to pass on after a few generations if it were the standard. Though maybe I'm not thinking thorough it properly.
How about a variation of what the Spanish do? In Spain, children take one name from their father and one from their mother, every child is named using the patrilineal names of there two grandfathers. Of course this leads to information loss, as the name of the grandmothers gets dropped. You have to lose information obviously, otherwise you'd get unwieldy names.
How about changing it so that for the children's names, the mother contributes the name she got from her mother and the father the name he got from his father.
So John Smith-Davis and Mary Hill-Richards have children who have Smith-Richards as a last name and the name of John's mother and Mary's father get dropped.
As someone with a Dutch last name, hyphenation would be quite hard. There are already plenty of systems, either old enough to be from an age where bits where precious or developed by incompetents that can't handle my last name because it has spaces in it. I shudder to think what would happen if I added a hyphen to that.
I have a friend who told me his story enrolling in his university. He's a German national who grew up in Spain. I'm going to call him Andres Schmidt, as the actual name is not relevant.
In Spain, people normally have two surnames, one from the mother and one from the father (no, it doesn't exponentially grow with generations :D). He had issues enrolling in uni, as the system required two surnames so he ended up with "Andres Schmidt Schmidt". He had issues down the road as well, having to explain himself every time he needed to register for something. I think the student id was also a hash which included the name and he hadn't been consistent with his "full" name in all systems.
or you know both can keep their family name without any change, sounds like best solution to me, why change anyone's name because of relationship document?
i didn't even had to think about it since i have western name, my wife has Chinese, so either combination would look extremely strange at least for us (for mixed children i find it acceptable to see western given name with Chinese foreign name, but for someone not mixed it's odd)
I once tried to open a bank account in Spain, which could not be done because I did not have a second last name. Spanish babies receive the last names of both parents.
The employee was trying her best and I eventually suggested she could put my last name twice. She made a face for an instant then said she was not allowed to do that.
I later understood that the face was because having two identical last names suggests inbreeding or incest... I am sure there are plenty of jokes about that in Spanish culture. lol.
I never managed to open the account and in the end had to go to a different bank.
In Spain, everyone has two surnames. Your first surname is your father's first surname, and your second surname is your mother's first surname. What this means is that in a family of mum, dad and kids, only the kids will share the same surname.
We had a German friend who married a Spanish man, and she insisted on changing her surname to his when they got married since that was traditional for her. But for Spanish people this was really weird, since it sounded like they were siblings. I actually haven't asked them since they had kids, but I guess their kids must have his first surname doubled (which is not unusual - María Sanchez Sanchez just means that the first surname of both parents was Sanchez).
I'm Brazilian, a country where the vast majority of people will have at least two last names (typically one maternal, one paternal, but not uncommonly multiple from either or both parents), separated by spaces.
I've immigrated to the US, where the standard is for people to have a single last name, or if they have multiple, they're separated by hyphens.
To make my situation a little worse, legally I have two first names i.e. the second one is not registered as a middle name in any official document I have.
I've dealt with systems that wouldn't accept my last names. I either had to join them together, or separate them by a hyphen.
Some systems don't accept my legal double first name. When I got my driver's license in WA, the system accepted it but later had trouble generating the license identifier, so they had to manually apply the system's logic and enter it by hand.
Some systems just ask you to enter your full legal name, and then try to be smart about figuring out what your first, middle, and last names are. So I end up with the first of my last names being registered as a middle name, and I can't edit it.
Fortunately I'm close to being able to apply for naturalization, and that'll give me the opportunity to change my name. I'll just drop part of my first name and one of my last names and finally make it simple.
Edit: another thing that's funny wrt names in my life is my family situation. My wife has her own two last names (it's not super common in Brazil for women to take their husband's last name), and she has a daughter from her first marriage. So we all have totally different last names, with only my wife and my stepdaughter sharing one of their last names. That caused us a little bit of trouble crossing the border to Canada once.
> i can imagine issues even in European countries not used to middle names
Are there any? Pretty much everyone I know in Europe has at least two given name and in some cases also two family names (Spain for instance). Here in Norway it is also common to have a first given name that is actually composed of two separate words without a hyphen, it looks like a name plus a middle name but is in fact what Norwegians call a double name and the person is addressed by both never by just one of them, see https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_over_norske_dobbeltnavn.
And of course Icelanders don't use family names but instead use patronymics; for instance Björk Guðmundsdóttir where Björk's father's name is Guðmundur Gunnarsson and her mother's is Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. They might or might not have middle names.
If you design a user interface that asks for a name please just let the user write the name as they wish with no restrictions on length and please don't try to force a surname into one box and a given name into another and don't forbid hyphens and spaces, etc.
I rather had forenames in the back of my mind when I wrote my post. But indeed, because it is hard to change your name in Germany, I know quite some women who used marriage to get rid of a surname that they did not like, because there is hardly any other socially accepted way to get rid of it.
If you move to another country I am of the opinion that you should have a certain respect for the conventions of the welcoming country. So you might not agree with their naming conventions, but why should I expect the country to change just because I show up on the scene?
In an English speaking county, having a separate surname aids in sorting and presentation of family unities. The character set is typically A-Z. In Spain e.g. one expects a person the have two surnames. The default — but this can be changed – is that first name is from the father and the second one from the mother. By looking at the order of your name you can get information about family structures. Character set is A-Z + Ñ + umlauts and accent marks.
Going to an English speaking country I could expect them to spell my first name correctly; but since it contains a character outside A-Z I change my name to comply with their modus operandi. Yes, their computer system probably supports UTF8, but most people have never heard of this character and you won't find it on their keyboard. No problem, I change my name to comply with their system.
In Spain official forms often expect two surnames and certain characters. No problem, I use an extra hyphen, change my name, use my middle name as a surname or whatever makes the system happy.
Is it perfect? No. Does it really matter? No. So I just respect their customs and get on with my life as a respectful guest in the country where I am living.
reply