In Québec (note this is province-specific; I don’t know the case for the rest of Canada) a child can have either a single or double (hyphenated) surname that must be derived from the parents’ surnames.
If the parents both have compounded surnames (hyphenated), the child’s surname can be made up of any two of the four names. If only one parent is known, the child takes the name of the parent on the birth certificate.
In an interesting aside, your birth name is your name for life in Québec, even if you get married. (As I understand the law) Had I married in Ontario, I could have changed my name on my driver’s license and everywhere else and took my husband’s name…until I returned to Québec. Since I was born here, I would have been required to re-take my maiden name legally, though I could use his name socially. This is, again, a Québec specific thing and I don’t know if any other jurisdictions have taken away the free name change with marriage. I don’t mind - it saved me the trouble of deciding if I wanted to change my name or not
Dan Savage was yammering on recently about traveling with his son. His son has neither his last name nor his partner’s so when they travel they are often grilled about their son.
He wasn’t complaining as much as making a point. If you try to take a child across borders that does not have the same last name as you, you would be advised to have supporting documents.
No, foreign children keep their own names and are not “nationalized” into German names.
Since there’s so much snark about the German naming law, maybe you need to know the reasoning behind it: to protect the child.
The law is that a child must have a normal name that lets people recognize whether the child is female or male. This means no unusual spellings, no trade marks, and no “buttfucker” or “Little Satan” or similar. Because the lawmakers realized that children with unusual names will be made fun off during their vulnerable childhood years, although they had no choice at all in that matter, so the state protects the interest of the child not be taunted against the interests of the parents to be “creative”. (If you want to be creative, name your car or your pet anything you like).
Every year, some cases come to family court to decide which names are acceptable and which aren’t.
It’s also not a special German invention out of bureaucratic spite, it’s part of the big Code Napoleon that is the basis for most western contintenal countries. (Napoloen didn’t write it, he called a commission of experts and because he ruled a lot of countries it was made law widespread. When the countries threw off Napoleon and wrote their own laws, they kept the sensible parts.)
I recall a news item about 10 years ago where the parents in France were not allowed to call their child “Cerise” (Cherry). France apparently has a law against unusual names too. (Napoleonic code again?) They refused to allow that name on the birth certificate. The funny thing was that across the channel, the Prime Minister’s wife was Cherry.
I’m pretty sure that members of this board have discussed this issue before and the result has been an impasse.
There are people who think that the risk of parents giving an abusive name to a child is so strong that the government is justified in instituting preemptive naming rules.
My views include:
Abusive naming cannot possibly be such a widespread problem that it actually requires what is essentially a prior restraint system. The government should be empowered to act only in those cases that some kind of abusive case is shown. In other words, show me an actual situation in which a parent tries to use the name “Buttfucker” an then I’ll agree with government action. Otherwise, the government should not be setting down blanket rules on naming.
Even in such cases, there is no guarantee that disallowing an abusive name to be registered would actually prevent a parent from calling a kid by an abusive name. “Yes, I told the government that I’m naming you Karl-Heinz Gruber, but I’m going to call you Buttfucker instead! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Even if every kid in the playground is named Karl-Heinz and Christian-Jurgen and Gottfried-Helmut, the bullies on the playground will still come up with ways to make fun of people’s names.
The government has no business mandating gender identity issues.
The government has no business ossifying naming traditions. If individual Germans (I’m using Germans just because they’ve come up as an example – this applies to anyone) want to take steps that change the traditional perceptions of names, then they should be allowed to do so. In English there are many names that are ambiguous in a gender sense, and there are many names that have switched along the scale of masculine-ambiguous-feminine. Culture and society should be allowed the flexibility to change based on the individual decisions of individuals.
– Okay, I don’t see these particular rules as having been offered any justification at all.
They “realized” no such thing. They “assumed” it or “made it up.” Not everyone with an unusual name will be made fun of. Not everyone made fun of has an unusual name. Government regulation of names will not prevent kids from being made fun of.
Why shouldn’t I be “creative” with my child’s name? Every name that exists today was the result of creativity at some point. Why should I not be given that same freedom?
I have heard such tales of presumptuous nurses. They either don’t understand the law or they take it into their own hands.
Québec - perhaps obviously, given it’s historical links to France - also has laws regarding what a child can be named, though I’m not entirely certain what those laws are. The reasoning is one of avoiding ridicule, as I understand it, though there is an appeal process and I’ve known or heard of kids with interesting variant spellings or unusual names (Mykayla, Arizona, Zöé (it’s the diacritics that make that one weird)), so I don’t know how strict the laws are. I think the law is more or less a judgement call on a case-by-case basis, and there’s an opportunity to appeal or explain a name.
Personally, the laws don’t bother me, since the cases I hear about tend to be rather extreme - like wanting to name a child “Colander” or something. I kind of agree in principle with protecting children from idiots.
I can understand the argument that some “creative” names are bad for the kids, even though I don’t like the idea of legislating names.
I do not understand a country that won’t allow a legal adult to change their name. If I’ve always hated the name “Gary,” or I want to change my sept-based surname back to the clan name, or I want to simplify the spelling of my last name, why should the government be able to tell me no? How am I hurting society if I wish to become Angus or Bob or Carl instead of Gary?
Society does have some interest in keeping track of who an individual is and what he’s done, and keeping a consistent legal name makes that a lot easier. Makes it harder for people to dodge their past. I’m not saying that that should outweigh your desire to change your name. But it’s not totally irrelevant.
You could always just tell people to call you “Angus”. It’s not particularly uncommon for people to go by a name other than their legal one.
And what happens when a Japanese couple living in Europe have a daughter and try to name her “Yuri”, which is a perfectly normal name for a girl in Japanese but is also a Slavic boy’s name (e.g. Yuri Gagarin)…
I don’t know about the other countries under discussion, but when “society” wants to know what I’ve done, it uses my Social Security Number*, not my name. There are too darned many people with the same name in this overcrowded world of ours.
Or in some cases, fingerprints and/or DNA samples. I just applied for a substitute teaching position and got fingerprinted. I had to be fingerprinted and background-checked before I could be a 4-H leader, too.
Frank Zappa tells in his autobiography that the nurse taking down birth certificate information for his second child stubbornly refused to accept the name Dweezil. Zappa ended up rattling off a string of “normal” Christian names (belonging to various band members and friends), and that’s what went on Dweezil’s birth certificate. Dweezil himself was proud of his name, and when he found out that it wasn’t on his birth certificate, he had it legally changed to Dweezil.
Keeping in mind that most of the countries in question have government-subsidized education and healthcare, in addition to social services for adults, there is a benefit in knowing which Gary Robson went to So-And-So Public school and got all his childhood vaccinations and which when to ThisOtherOne Public school and broke his arm when he was 2 and didn’t receive his rubella booster shot or whatever other data a government office or hospital is trying to look up.
Matching a name to a SIN provides an additional confirmation as to the identity of the person in question since it is possible to do things like transpose numbers. Looking at wikipedia, it’s only been since 1990 that a SSN was assigned to newborns, so the name mattered more for children then than it does now.
I understand what you’re saying, mnemosyne, but you’re making it sound like the government wouldn’t keep any records.
“Let’s see, SSN 314-15-9265 was originally issued to Bubba McBubberson, who legally changed his name to Percival Snootmeister at age 19. Looks like we’re good.”
That’s for the countries that use an unique number to trace an individual in all administrative contexts. A lot of countries assign a number for that express purpose; some like the US use a number (the SSN) that originally was intended for another purpose.
This is not possible e.g. in Germany where a personal numerical identifier spanning different administrative domains has been ruled unconstitutional (constitutional court rulings in 1969 and 1983) as violating personal dignity and privacy. East Germany had personal identification numbers and we West Germans considered them somewhat odious at the time.
Fine. You have your opinion, I have mine. That doesn’t mean that your opinion is right, and it’s correct to compare German naming laws to execution.
In the many previous discussion about unusual names in the US, many weird names have come up.
Also, a system that only applies in special cases is much more open to abuse than a rule that applies to everybody. Maybe you misunderstand how this works - parents aren’t given a list of 20 approved names by gender and pick one. They get a baby book, and pick a name (or several) and register the birth.
Only in a few cases every year does the official say “No, that spelling is not normal, that name is weird”, and in fewer cases the parents disagree and go to court to get it sorted out.
Nobody said it would eliminate bullying and name-calling.
But having an unusual names especially invites children to make fun off, because standing out attracts attention and often making fun off.
I agree, and I wish they would listen to the small group of third gender people and change that.
However, in practical life, knowing that a person is male or female not only helps in addressing letters, it does make things easier.
Um, how the frack do you know what the lawmakers realized? Why do you doubt that they had the best interests of children in mind? What’s so horrible if parent’s rights are limited by the govt. to protect the children?
We can actually compare the naming law with another incidence which obviously had very different aims and therefore different methods: the re-naming of Jewish names in late 19th century in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for order of assimilation. No rules were given, so small officials used this both for personal gain (bribery) and petty abuse of power by giving ridicolous names (the same prinicple shows up in the TV series Alien nation, when small-time US officials go around naming the former Tenkton slaves with ridicolous names like Sam Francisco and similar).
Because it’s your child who suffers from having to correct a creative spelling; of having less opportunities at jobs and other offers*, and who is being thought of as moron because you thought “La-dash-a” was funny.
And past names are not result of creativitiy as used today. Past names have a meaning (and usually a positive one), not a creative spelling or an insult like little Devil, or a trade mark to earn 1 000 dollars from a company.
And what country are you thinking off? Because German naming laws don’t forbid you from changing your name. It’s however made difficult so you don’t change your name every week, because
that messes up the records
makes it easier for criminals to disappear
So you need to pay a fee and show you have serious cause to change your name.
Remember that these laws go back to times long before computer databases tracking people with SSN, and that European countries don’t always have SSN. Name + DOB is the easiest way to track people, so changing last names nilly-willy messes that up.
