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The reality, Mr. Awgu, 34, said, is that long, foreign-sounding names do not end up sticking. “The practical effect of that is nobody calls them that,” he said. “So they end up with some truncated name that is Anglicized any way.”
The issue for some people, however, is making an effort.
Marwa Balkar, who does humanitarian work, is from California but has Circbadian heritage. On the first day of a job she once had, she told her manager her name, which is pronounced phonetically, just like it looks. The manager asked her if she went by any other name.
“Is my five-letter, perfectly phonetic name too difficult for you,” Ms. Balkar recalled thinking.
In other instances, Ms. Balkar said that people just shorten her name or give her nicknames that they make up, like Mars or Mar. “I think it’s a combination of physical appearance, foreign name and fear of mispronouncing it,” Ms. Balkar, 25, said of why people were reluctant to call her by her proper name. “I don’t mind mispronunciation at all. What I do love is just effort, whether you nail it or not.”
During a recent conversation with a radio host, Anand Giridharadas, a writer, said the host kept mispronouncing his name. He eventually tried to correct him.
“You know, you all have no problem saying Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky,” he recalled saying. The host responded by pointing out that he learned to pronounce Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky because both were famous.
“The reality is that a lot of this has to do not with names but with whiteness,” Mr. Giridharadas, 37, said. “There are a lot of complicated names from Polish and Russian and Italian and German backgrounds that have become second nature to Americans.” The “unusual” names referred to in the Dear Abby column aren’t unique in their complexity, he said. They just tend to come from places where people aren’t white.
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