Is changing my name to a name with a Scandinavian character “ø” in it a bad idea?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Upon learning more about my heritage, I learned that my surname used to be spelled with a slashed o “ø” When my ancestors immigrated to the US, this character would alternately get changed to an “o” or “e.”

I like the idea of correcting a bastardized name, but I am concerned about how various institutions that have to enter my new name in their systems will be unable to type the “ø” character, effectively re-bastardizing it. Making the change pointless.

Does anyone have any first-hand experience with something like this?

2

As a person of Irish heritage, with an apostrophe in my last name, I find it a constant headache. Most American data systems just aren’t able to handle any non-standard characters in people’s names.

3

“A møøse once bit my sister”

I recall from times past and just confirmed that many text searches will recognize ‘ø’ as ‘o’. Other applications may not deal with it as gracefully. You could program a key for that purpose, or just to enter your name through auto-fill, but otherwise you may end up not having a way to enter that character in some applications. I think if it was me I’d stick to maintaining my name in the infospace with conventional characters and save the new version for stylistic usage.

4

A friend of mine has Ukrainian ancestry (according to him) and his last name certainly sounds Eastern European. The name was changed a little over time, replacing an “o” with a thingy over top with a plain “o” and changing the last letter from “c” to “ch”.

His son became interested in genealogy and ended up changing his last name back to the original form and the pronunciation to being more guttural.

It was a bit of a headache going to court, notifying all the different places (driver’s license, credit cards, etc) but overall the kid (he’s 35) is happy.

5

I know how to apply that character no problem. I’m more concerned about government institutions and businesses that aren’t as savvy.

6

This is the crucial issue. And it’s unsolvable. If you use non-standard format for your name, you WILL have problems.

Many, many, many computer systems in many many places use software written by Americans, and many Americans have no concept that the rest of the planet exists.

According to their software:
All human beings have exactly one first name, one middle initial and one last name of less than 15 letters, in standard English alphabet.

All human beings have an address that fits on 2 lines, formatted as number, streetname, cityname, state. (example:All human beings live at 1234 Maple Street, nobody lives at Maplestrauss 1234 )

All human beings live in one of 50 places, each with a two-letter abbreviation.

All human beings have a telephone number formatted in exactly 3-3-4 digits.

So Beware!
If you use a non-standard format, there are times when it won’t work, and you will regret it.

An Anecdote:
When I travel to the US, I carry my foreign phone. (I purchase a package from my foreign phone company which gives me a temporary synchronization to Verizon in America, but leaves my number the same, so anyone back home can reach me with the usual number in their contacts.)
But this means that my phone number for Americans dialing me within America looks like this:
12-345-6-789-1234

Most web sites cannot handle this! (I couldn’t use Uber).

When I travelled during covid, I had to have a lab test done the day of the flight. I tried to give my number and home address (with its funny-looking, furriner format) to the covid-testing labs in the airport… Impossible! Their computers exploded, and I almost got kicked off the flights.

So my advice about changing your name is simple : Don’t do it!!

There will be problems with some businesses, and you may not know it till it’s too late. Some places may just change your funny-furriner-letter to a regular, red-blooded-'Merican letter, and it might well work in their local system. (Who is going to notice those 2 dots missing over the letter o?)
But that could cause huge problems later. Suppose documents from one place don’t match your name with documents at another place–such as your bank, the title deed on your house, the name on your passport, the IRS, etc.
Be careful.

7

You should be because, when creating student/staff accounts in Powerschool for example, we simply do not use them, and we drop spaces and special characters as well. However, the name in student demographics has to be identical by law to the name on the birth certificate,

8

I literally did this for the same reason, only with an accented vowel. Canada theoretically accepted it, but only because French uses that particular accented vowel, too. It’s on my passport, but not driving licence or much else.

Everyone in the USA ignores the accent officially and informally.

9

I’d listen to @chappachula! Many Indonesians have only one name, sometimes with more characters than forms allow, and I have heard plenty of stories of the frustration that caused.

10

We gave each of our 3 sons a Welsh 3rd name as a family tradition. Our youngest has the name Llŷr which caused a problem when we registered the birth.

The UK birth registration system does not have the ŷ character as an option. Lots of French and Scandinavian etc letters with accents, but not this Welsh one. The registrar resolved the issue by printing the birth certificate out with a standard y and then filling in the ^ in pen and adding a note to the registration file. So it is officially part of his name but we’ve had to apply for passports and other such stuff using plain old Llyr.

The system did manage Glyndŵr a few years earlier though. Who needs English vowels?

11

It means encryption enable in part of my world.

Check the knob-top view of the radio here, the encryption/Securenet toggle is on the far left.

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/motorola/saber/index.htm

12

Or (perhaps worse) they know that in some languages the ö was an abbreviation of “oe” and that’s still a legitimate alternate spelling in some circumstances. (says the person doing a family tree where the surname is spelled with “oe” , “ö” or “o” - and sometimes multiple spellings are used for the same person)
"

13

On the flip side, I’ve lost track of how many non-American companies think

Cityname, ST 00001

means

Cityname
ST 00001

14

I would be cautious with any kind of deviation from traditional American English alphabet data entry.

For some reason a couple government websites decided to put a dash in between the letters in my last name (It’s a Scottish last name). I could not verify my voter registration online and had to call my local office which is where I discovered this weirdness.

Then I discovered one of my online utility bills has performed the same dash malarkey on my name.

I have never experienced this before.

There appears to be enough name manipulation shenanigans going on out there without adding to your trouble.

15

If changes to the exact representation of your name (“bastardizing it”) seem like a slap in the face to your heritage or to others of your ancestry, your desire to change it back are understandable, and my hat is off to you.

But I wonder if there might be other ways to honor the traditions of your familial homeland.

Another bit of anecdata: my own last name has commonplace letters and nothing at all unusual - except that it somewhat resembles some other names with a pattern of a second capital. That’s it. Just a non-capitalized letter where many expect an uppercase one.

I am forever having to tell people: "please check the list again, it’s (spelling). Forever having pharmacists say, “no we still haven’t filled that one - well, wait, let me check a different bin.”

It’s a big enough nuisance I’d happily change it, if that process weren’t a bigger nuisance.

16

Depends on the government institution. The one I work for couldn’t handle any sort of non-standard character until a few years ago; any attempts to use one resulted in that character being replaced with ¿.

BTW: I’m mostly Scandinavian myself; our surname was Americanized to something completely different at least three generations ago. Going back to our original name seems rather pointless.

17

I used to see that upside down question mark all over the place but it does seem to have recently disappeared.

Thanks for solving that mystery!

18

:+1:
 

19

As someone who spent many years testing webpages, many of them
containing forms, I would not recomend doing this. All the forms I tested
were set up to accept upper and lowercase letters, apostrophes and hypens
and sometimes periods. Any odd non-english character (i.e. ø, ç, ñ, ö)
would be rejected.

20

I think it’d be much worse than this, because you won’t be able to predict how they will re-bastardize it. It means you will have a wildcard character in your name.

Slight hijack – I read of somebody who had single letter first and middle names. His given name was “R B Jones”, and those are not abbreviations (hence no periods). After somebody wouldn’t accept his name because they assumed they were abbreviations, he tried again with “R(only) B(only) Jones”. The system turned him into “Ronly Bonly Jones.”