Just so long as everyone remembers that students born in Scandinavia, Thailand, etc., will have non-EBCDIC characters in their names. And some people have no birth certificate…
I have had to deal with paperwork problems, but not this one. Since you asked for opinions, it’s crazy to worry about what some characters might do to a defective ca. 1995 web site that can’t handle an apostrophe or accent. Just write your name the way you prefer on official forms, and be consistent.
More about apostrophes … many computer systems can handle them these days, but not all by any stretch. Not even within a single system. I had the experience of signing up for an airline frequent flyer program, with apostrophe. But no apostrophes allowed in purchasing a plane ticket. And I couldn’t edit my name- had to call customer service and ask them to take out the apostrophe before I could purchase a flight.
Sometimes the apostrophe gets dropped, and my last name is all run together. Sometimes it’s replaced by a space, and the O is treated like a middle initial. Some systems ignore the apostrophe when alphabetizing, some treat it as coming after z. I’m accustomed to people having great difficulty finding me in a list.
No idea if a ø would cause similar problems, but brace yourself if you decide to go for it.
In a previous job we worked with music streaming services and the feed processing stopped working one day. The problem was some stray umlauts that the code wasn’t prepared for. It became known internally as the Mötley Crüe bug.
My wife has a hyphen in her middle name. Not too exciting, one would think: Plenty of people have hyphenated names. Yet an amazing number of online forms can’t accept a hyphen. Including virtually all airline ticketing sites.
Nobody writes their name anymore.
You type your name.
And a hundred other clerks and bureaucrats have to type your name, too. Which is what causes problems. I have no idea how to type an umlaut or a French accent mark. And neither does my bank teller, or my lawyer.
So many databases can’t handle a child with the simple name Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--.
When I was a university bureaucrat in a very international institution, I had no end of trouble designing registration forms to cope with all the different cultural naming conventions. The then (British English) traditional “Christian name” was obviously out, “First name/Last name” didn’t suit the single-name cultures or those used to officialdom putting the surname/last name first, “Given name” worked for some but then, what to do about the inherited name? I tried “Family name”, but then someone from A Certain Country put “Bud”, by which time I gave up.
If I were the OP, I’d listen to @chappachula. I don’t have any special characters in my name, but I have two of them, as is usual in Spanish speaking countries, but without the hyphen that is mostly used in German speaking countries when you have what they call a Doppelname. That alone is a mess!
And an amazing number of online forms can’t accept two names without a hyphen!
Imagining the German name to be Müller, the Spanish name to be Cañete and the first name to be Søren gives me cold sweat. Add in an apostrophe* or two and you will have your personal bureaucratic hell on earth.
* But which apostrophe? This one ', this ´one, this `one or this , one?
So, is anyone reading this a bureaucrat who can describe what it is they actually do? (Note that names like José are pretty common in the US; it’s not like they don’t see them.) Type in the letter without an accent? (That can potentially cause insidious problems, as has been described.)
My trick is, if there is a symbol I do not know how or cannot be bothered to type, I can always select it from the character menu.
I’ve never been the bureaucrat who is typing in the original record - I’ve been the one looking for someone’s records later. And there doesn’t seem to be any consistency for many issues even within the same entity. Accent marks usually get dropped and ü becomes u and so on but when you get into hyphens or apostrophes , that’s another story. Some of it is because different people write their names differently - some women write Birthname-Marriedname while others are Birthname Marriedname and some look like it’s Birthname Marriedname but its actually Middlename Lastname. Then you’ve got the “O” names , which as far as I can tell are always spelled with the apostrophe by their owners but might have been in my employer’s records as “O’MALLEY” , “OMALLEY” or “O MALLEY”
I have an Irish “O’Name” and the apostrophe goes missing on half of my credit cards and official documents. Some airlines will drop the apostrophe from my online reservations and then give me grief at check-in because it doesn’t exactly match my passport.
Speaking as someone who’s seen a lot of student rosters, I’ve seen O’names rendered both with and without the apostrophe. Sometimes both at the same school. Presumably, either the school was importing its data from multiple other sources (like a high school using the data exactly as it was given to them by the middle school), and the sources differed in how they handled it, or some parents assumed that the system wouldn’t be able to handle it and so removed the apostrophe themself, even when they didn’t actually need to.
My wife has an apostrophe in her last name as well. It’s a giant pain in the ass sometimes. And that’s not nearly as rare as some letters. Some forms are fine some aren’t. Right now we are fighting our health insurance company because she is signed up under her name but some claims are submitted like the first letter of her last name is actually her middle initial. Her name isn’t the same as Vincent D’Onofrio‘s but it’s a similar issue. I can’t imagine the issue that ø would cause.
I’ve had enough troubles with different systems treating middle names differently. I would definitely avoid including a nonstandard letter in my legal name if i had that option.
Sign your name with the slash. Your signature can be let much anything, and no one but you has to produce it. But keep your legal name simple. That’s my advise.
So the moral of the story is that we should all compromise to conform to American English computer coding conventions, because it’s easier.
What else must people do to conform?
I know it’s a serious hassle (I have posted elsewhere about trying to explain to Americans that our post codes are six characters, three of them letters: I get actual mail with 00000 on it). But it’s trivially easy to type these characters. If you don’t know how, look it up. If your system won’t allow you, escalate the problem until that gets changed.
Easier said than done, but programs are just programs, not immutable destiny.
You can do whatever you want. Just don’t have any delusions that you can fight against it and win. Have an ę in your name if you want. Doesn’t mean anyone is going to conform to you. With the government who are you going to escalate it to? The contractor who set up the program but who’s contract is up? Who is going to take up the banner and fight for all the œøǐę’s of the world? Do you really want to fight every company and organization with a computer that you encounter in your life?
Here is the thing: whether O’Malley, OMALLEY, or Ó Máille, as far as the computer is concerned their actual name is something along the lines of 63103664. There is never going to be any universally consistent way of transforming names when even members of the same family may spell it differently.
There is no fight, though. The computer simply displays on the screen whatever is in the record. Searching for “ễ” is the same as searching for “e” (yes, I tried it). I can see that “how to type it in?” might be a concern, but while we still haven’t heard from a quorum of professional bureaucrats there is no way they do not encounter accented characters on a frequent bases and know how to deal with them. José is a significantly more common name than Alan in the US right now.
PS based on some of the responses, I suspect that “drop all accents, diacritics, punctuation, and hyphens” still happens a lot in various places. So Søren should not be super surprised to see “Soren” on a credit card printed out by old equipment, or whatever.
A friend of mine recently wrote a rather heartbreaking post about struggling with their identity since they followed their spouse to the USA for work. This friend has a hyphenated first name (with a ö in it), no middle name, and a last name (which is not the same name as their spouse, because québécois people don’t change last names when they get married).
It’s been a collosal headache for every form and system in the USA that just isn’t set up for this, despite names like this being incredibly common and handled well daily in Québec. My friend always uses their full hyphenated name (the second part is a tie to their father) and doesn’t like being called only by the first part and certainly doesn’t go by initials.
They feel lost, disconnected, and disrespected whenever the issue comes up because they always have to settle for something that "isn’t actually their name*.
They are committed to the move for the spouse’s career, but I suspect they’ll eventually move back home. Selfishly, I hope they do, I miss them.
They are if no one is willing to risk modifying them. And NOBODY is going to go out of their way to do that just because I want my name to resemble that of a Heavy Metal band.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean here, but I assume you mean something along the lines of that I will have the same ID number no matter how someone spelled my name. And that might be true, and it might be useful under some circumstances , like when the number is known. My job still used a circa 1985, green text on black system when I retired a couple of years ago. And the people I was dealing with didn’t know their numbers, any more than I know my medical record number when I go to the doctor. So I had to look them up by name.