Call Me by My First Name

Nowadays, we live in a world where the red underlining of spell check shows up under our names, never processing that a proper noun foreign to dominant culture could possibly be correct. I accept the squiggly red line telling me that my name is wrong. After all, a computer program doesn’t have a great effect on my identity. However, hearing this from an authority figure has quite a different effect.

When we think of the identity of an individual, it tends to be something related to practices, experiences, and ideas that directly pertain to them. However, the identity of individuals extends beyond this in the power of a name. What is in a name? First of all, for an individual, it becomes a vessel of their own identity. I’ll use my own name as an example. When I hear “I like Andreamarie”, I process that as someone likes me, what I stand for, how I act, and how I portray myself. My name is how I manifest my personal identity in the external world. One is inextricable from each other. This connection is usually recognized. Secondly, and lesser known, my name makes me part of a group: most immediately my family group, then my cultural or ethic group.

I began to truly understand this only when my name was taken away from me. In pre-school, my teachers began to call me Andrea. It was somehow decided that my middle name was in fact Marie instead of recognizing my full name. As a four-year-old, I was completely fine with this. I didn’t want to inconvenience my teachers or peers. The only one who seemed to have a problem with my nickname was my mother. “It’s not your name” she would always yell, sounding incredibly offended. Only now do I understand why she took it as a personal affront. My name comes from my two grandparents, Andreas and Maria. Naming his/her child after their parents is the highest honors a Greek Cypriot man or woman can give to them. For people to utterly disregard that was the greatest insensitivity she could imagine. 

For us with ethnically significant names, our name integrates us into an ingroup. Compared to the rest of my classmates, I was in an outgroup because of my unfamiliar name. The teacher shortening it then put me in the ingroup, but then created an internal conflict. I felt that I had to adopt a different identity based on my new name. The shortening of my name also put me in an outgroup, within my own household and as well as within the Greek Cypriot community. Mary Seeman’s work “Name and Identity” , delineates the naming practices of different ethic groups. Seeman uses the following anecdote to illustrate the weight that names carry:

 “In the summer of 1977, the Ontario Human Rights' Commission displayed an advertisement in the province's public transit vehicles. It read: For Pete's sake, for Juanita's sake For Horst's sake, for Liv's sake, For Dmitri's sake, for Maria's sake, For Nadia's sake, for Chi Ming's sake, For Aziz's sake, for Sol's sake, For everybody's sake, let's work together.”

What Seeman effectively drives home by bringing this up is how a name can stand for a whole ethic group, thus emphasizing the part of one’s own identity that is tied to their culture through their name. While we most often recognize the link between name and individual identity, we tend to overlook how name association with a cultural identity is also salient to the development of the whole identity of an individual. In the formative stages of an individuals’ life, breaking this connection by nicknaming or shortening a child’s name does not give them the opportunity to fully explore their identity in relation to this larger shared identity.

There is now a national campaign that seeks to raise awareness for this issue. It is called “My Name, My Identity”. The campaign appears to emphasize this exact effect. For example, there is a video on the homepage of the website of several students explaining what exactly their name means and why this name was chosen by their parents. From meaning “one who cares about people” in a native tongue, translating into jade river, or being the name of one’s grandparents, it is evident that all of the students recognize that their identities are influenced by their names.

So why does this campaign focus on the names of school age children, and why is there a call for action for teachers to pronounce names correctly? As Helen Morton wrote in her piece “I IS FOR IDENTITY: What’s in a Name”, “Our names become a fundamental part of our identities, both in the way we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us…” (67). The key word is “become”. Identity is fluid, constantly being developed, with formative changes happening in childhood. A simple nickname imposed on a child is more than that, it establishes an idea that the original name needs modification to be acceptable.

"People who particularly dislike their name and also if other people think it's an odd and unlikeable name, that can cause some problems," said  psychology professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "[They] tend not to be as well-adjusted." This indicates that those that interact with children during the formative years of their lives, when identity is developing, have a responsibility to be aware of the effects of name on identity.

Works Cited

Hedrick, Michael. “How Our Names Shape Our Identity.” The Week , 15 Sept. 2013.

Morton, Helen. “I IS FOR IDENTITY: What's in a Name?” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 45, no. 1, 2001, pp. 67–80.

Seeman, Mary V. “Name and Identity.” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 25, no. 2, Mar. 1980, pp. 129–137, doi:10.1177/070674378002500206.