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Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
270 points by evolve2k on Aug 31, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 510 comments
Our app is designed to be used across the Asia Pacific.

We have members who follow western naming conventions as well as members following common asian naming conventions.

Turns out there can be alot of variation on what is the convention.

https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/a-guide-to-using...

How would you handle different naming conventions, so users see their name in the order they would like?

Family, Given

Given, Family




Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here.

Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth

SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name.

Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (given name only)

Malaysian name: Sharifah Azizah binti Syed Ahmad Tarmizi, (honorific surname: Sharifah) (given name: Azizah) (patronym) (father's honorific surname: Syed) (father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi)


The GOV.UK design system[1] agrees with you:

> "Use single or multiple fields depending on your user’s needs. Not everyone’s name fits the first-name, last-name format. Using multiple name fields mean there’s more risk that a person’s name will not fit the format you’ve chosen and that it is entered incorrectly."

and

> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do."

and

> "If your service stores personal information, you should allow users to update their details, including their name. Allowing users to change their name helps your service respect their personal identity. It also means they can continue using your service without having to start over. People change their name for many reasons. For example, because of a change in marital status, family situation or gender. Avoid making it hard for users to change their name. As well as causing them distress, it may make them reluctant to use your service."

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/names/


>> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do."

I'm always a bit surprised when I see some e.g. tech conferences still insisting on title as a mandatory field (or really asking at all). It's not just the gender and the marital status but some people attach a lot of significance to all manner of honorifics.

When I last registered for some conference put on by The Economist, it must have had 25 titles to choose from including a whole bunch of aristocratic and clergy-related titles.

Seems a lot easier just not to bother today.


If you plan to only do English forever that's acceptable, but there's _a lot_ of languages where you need to know someone's gender to be able to use their name in a sentence.

Weird thing to look over in a thread about internationalization


If this is why a website or a form asks for it, and there is no way around it, better just ask for it directly ("How would you prefer to be addressed? He/him, she/her, or neutral?") instead of a choice of 25 historical titles.


I always choose the clergy titles! (Monarch ones are never available)


In Discordian beliefs, everyone (even non-Discordians) is a pope, so this is perfectly legitimate.


What if they want to be addressed by those titles? Mr/Ms is always in the list so what is to be complained about here?


I'd assume in these languages you can get away with either not using the name, or going for a neutral form (same as when you don't know who you're speaking to)

French has that gendered structure too, with workarounds to manage uncertainty.


That assumption isn't valid.

In some languages in order to say anything about anything you have to apply either the masculine or feminine form of the verbs and adjectives, so there's no way around picking one of the two, so if you don't know, you must guess or assume.

And if we look at languages with three grammatical genders, for some of them the neutral option is exclusive to inanimate objects, and using these neutral-gender forms of verbs and adjectives involving any person is explicitly insultingly dehumanizing, you wouldn't even use it to refer to an animal, much less to any person unless you want to make a point of intentionally disrespecting them as "it", saying that they are not worthy to be considered a person. In these languages[1] we do see the neutral gender option applied towards nonbinary and transgender people, but it's done by transphobes as a way of dehumanizing them in conversations.

In such languages usually the proper way to behave if you don't know the gender or if that's a mixed gender group is to default to masculine grammatical gender; because there's no polite way to avoid choosing; and, I might guess that there's also probably some aspect that historical patriarchal social reasons it might have been traditionally considered that misgendering someone male-to-female is more offensive than misgendering someone female-to-male, so that's how that default might have come to be.

[1] edit - I know about some of these languages, I'm not asserting that this applies for all such languages, perhaps there are some of them where the social norms are different, it's very hard to generalize globally.


But aren't we talking about form fields? When would you absolutely need a gendered title from someone in a form field so that you could refer to them in the third person?

In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages, but you're also assuming that there aren't movements to change that. French is a good example where even though its heavily gendered, things are evolving to the point that Le Robert even includes 'iel' as a pronom personnel [1]. Sure its use is contentious, but so are gendered pronouns even in English are still contentious for some people, but it exists and people do use it.

[1] https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/definition/iel


> In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages,

No, I explicitly did not mention pronouns, my post was about all the language groups where merely changing pronouns is barely scratching the surface as core grammar features rely on grammatical gender. Like, no offense intended, but French is not an example of a "heavily gendered language" - I'd consider French on the very low end of the grammatical gender complexity scale, where indeed suggestions such as yours might be plausible. For example, consider Hebrew or Slavic languages which have verbs and adjectives denoting the gender of the subject/object. Consider grammatical gender in Hindi or Welsh. And I'm not even talking about more complicated systems like you might see in Bantu languages.


There are many Indian languages where verb conjugations are either male or female and there is no neutral option.


By curiosity how do you deal with generic instructions ? Like if you needed to have "you will need to come to this counter to apply for special discounts" printed next to a ticketing machine ?


Male pronouns are assumed in most such cases, but that is not necessary in the example you provided—the instruction would be the same for both genders, in Hindi at least. "आपको विशेष छूट के लिए आवेदन देने के लिए इस काउंटर पर आना होगा।" It doesn't have any gendered pronouns, most such instructions don't.


Generally, male gender is presumed if a neutral form is not available.


There's some push to have gender neutral language in Spanish, but it's pretty controversial.


I would say that all gender-related changes are controversial. Otherwise they would have already happened.


And downright dumb-sounding.

"Todes"

Please stop.


You can certainly make titles optional or just part of a name field although, in the case of some titles like Dr., that still doesn't give you what you supposedly need anyway. Personally, if I had a form that didn't need title information for some reason, it's probably a minefield I would just bypass even if there are potential edge cases.


Couldn't people enter whatever is the equivalent of the nominative gendered singular form of the full name if they cared?


At least in Germany, titles are still rather important. I agree that it's silly but if you have a PhD you're very likely to put "Dr." on your doorbell name plate.


A doorbell I can understand;[1] it's your own home. But the requirements might be lower if you are signing up for some Lidl customer benefit club.

[1] Well, personally I think that's silly too. But it's a question of degree.


Can confirm. In Germany, recipients of a US visa often complain that their title isn't used on the visa, only their name. Especially PhD visa applicants.


I think that's just out of the necessity of not having to explain who exactly "her Dr Rer Nat" is.


My mom listed our family as my dad's name with "Dr." in front, I think in the phone book. My dad was never happy about that. But we're not German.


What do you mean by, "important"? That it's impolite to not refer to someone using their preferred title, or that people tend to expect them?


Depends on the person, some people do get insulted if you don't use their title in a formal setting. As said, it's rather silly IMHO.


Never had a Herr Doktor for a supervisor huh?


not to mention that often the title is Prof. Dr.


We had a go-live delayed because the sponsoring executive needed to demo the app to a board member, and would not do it until the UI showed the full greeting of “Prof. Dr. xxxx”. We had to shoehorn that into the data model at the last minute.


Yeah, professor is an actual title here, you can be a professor without being tenured.


When I worked for an ecommerce retailer in the UK, we had a title field, with some preset choices and a freeform other option.

The sw dev looked up a bunch of titles - Sir, Dame, Lord, Duke, Earl, Baron, Bishop, Prince, Princess, Reverend - and decided the DB field could be 8 letters.

Of course it broke for the first Archbishop.


I certainly don't mind being called "Mr.", but I don't see why it can't just be another field, or part of a free-text field.


Like you, I don't mind being called "Mr.", but the problem is that my sister would very much prefer not to put "Miss" (and not to lie) because it results in undesired advances, and my wife would also prefer to not put "Mrs." because it results in discrimination for the opposite reason, and because it results in people asking to talk to me instead. At the same time, you can't drop it entirely, because my aunt will complain loudly if she's not allowed to put the "Dr." honorific that's very important to her identity in a title field.

I agree with the recommendation that it's best just to have a big name field and allow users to be "Dr. Firstname Lastname" if they want that, or "Firstname Lastname" if they don't want a title, or "Englishname Surname Givename" if they want that.

The push-back usually becomes that you can't trivially parse it a single name field later to use part of the name conversationally as if you know the person closely and send them spam with "Hey <nickname>, we haven't heard from you in a while, did you know that we now offer blah?". Instead, be honest, if you can't even take the time to understand the name syntax of an entire country, you don't know that user closely.


Right, so ask them their full formal name, and how they want to be addressed.

  What is your full name?
    Ner D. P. Onx, BS DDS LCSW

  How would you like to be addressed?
    Mr. Onx


Isn’t the first problem you mentioned what “Ms” was invented for?


> would very much prefer not to put "Miss" (and not to lie) because it results in undesired advances, and my wife would also prefer to not put "Mrs." because it results in discrimination for the opposite reason

The opposite reason being that she desires advances? Unless you are implying an open marriage, that doesn’t sound right. Can you clarify what you mean?


> and because it results in people asking to talk to me instead.


No, for some reason it seems to result in her being ignored because she's unavailable. Probably preferable to undesired advances, but still not really treating her the same way they'd treat a man.


In an industry wide panic we renamed git master to git main, right after realtors renamed the "master bedroom", yet we're all continuing with an abbreviated "Master" or "Mistress".

Nobody said society was rational.


Just to add (as clergy myself) that clerical titles are in current use, are not limited to one faith tradition, and space ought to be allowed for them.


So how would you fill this email template:

> Dear <usually title> <usually last name>,


I'm privy to Software <D&D/Video Game Class Name> for titles.


Hmm, Software Barbarian, I like it.


On the other hand, HM Passport Office absolutely loves titles:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/titles-included-i...

My personal favourite is if you change your first name to “Sir” and you are not actually a “Knight”, then you get the note “THE REFERENCE TO SIR IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE” printed in your passport.

Context: I wanted “Dr.” to be added to my passport.


You also get this with Lord and I'd assume Baron, count, Duke, viscount or their feminine equivalents.

I do wonder what would happen if I used a tile that was not used in the UK.


Move to Britain, change your given name to Graf (that's German for the title of count/earl), and get a passport. I'm curious to see what the result would be, myself.


https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/titles-included-i...

If you set your title to "Graf" in the passport form:

> By Royal Warrant of 27 April 1932, the use in England and Wales of foreign titles of nobility was discontinued.

> You must include the observation: THE HOLDER IS ALSO KNOWN AS (foreign title).

If you instead set your given name to "Graf", these instructions would not apply, as you are not claiming it's your title. Nor would it be evident to the passport office or any other English speaker that your given name implied a title, so provided your supporting documents corroborate that "Graf" is your given name, they'd issue a passport in that name.

However, if you used not "Graf", but a title recognised in the English language:

> A person may call themselves any name they want, as long as it is not for fraudulent purposes

> You may receive an application supported by documents (for example, a birth certificate or a change of name deed) that shows a customer is using a name that includes a description of a title (for example, Lord, Princess, Earl or Baron as a forename).

> You must include the observation: THE REFERENCE TO (description of title) IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE.


How about just changing your name to Earl?


Already (implicitly) mentioned in the gp.


That seems good though, you want people checking it in an airport or whatever to get it right, believe that's your name, not insist that your name is just middle-last because the first (Sir) is honourific.


This has to be one of the best design systems I ever looked at...


As a UK citizen, I am routinely impressed by our government website. It is one of the few things this country does right, in my opinion. I know some people who work on the UI, and they put painstaking attention into every tiny detail to make things as accessible as possible. The goal is that it should be universally navigable by anyone, regardless of technical competence, disability or background.


As a web developer I’m impressed by the consistency, practical beauty and the respect of users.

We as technical nerds often forget how people actually interact with technology and assume way too much attention, familiarity and ability to understand UI patterns.

We often think of accessibility in terms of screen readers, but that’s just a fraction of the story…

Add varied devices, slow connections, very bad performance etc.

I’m craving for things like simplicity, performance, robustness and accessibility.

This looks like a holistic, carefully crafted design system. I’m looking forward to study it.


Title is the one that always confuses me since titles are basically non-existent here. It seems really like a really important thing in the Anglosphere and I have no idea why. I just always pick "Dr" when I'm forced to pick one. So far it has never made any difference.


My wife picked "Baroness" once from a drop down, and now we always know that they sold her info when we get junk mail addressed to "Baroness So-and-so."


(PhD) Dr. is a funny one in the Anglosphere and also at least parts of continental Europe (and possibly elsewhere). It's sort of a big deal in academia and some percentage of other people feel pretty attached to the title. For others, the attitude is more it's just a degree and lots of people have advanced degrees that we don't go around using honorifics for.


> It's sort of a big deal in academia and some percentage of other people feel pretty attached to the title.

Having been yelled at by colleagues for opting to not include Dr. on my own freaking business cards - here here.


> For others, the attitude is more it's just a degree

Good for them. In reality, it's not just a degree, it's the final degree.

It's the degree you start working towards only after you get just a degree.


A friend of mine got a PhD, and then got three more degrees (so far) afterwards.


> For others, the attitude is more it's just a degree and lots of people have advanced degrees that we don't go around using honorifics for.

Like what? Doesn't that argument work the other way around, that lots of people have equivalent or higher degrees than medicos, but only the latter are called doctors at their place of work?

All I can think is things like EngD, but I'd think those holders are as likely as PhDs to use the 'Doctor' from it, it's really just the term the university happened to use in awarding it.


The impression I get from some people I know with PhDs (or equivalent from schools that use different names) is that, in a non-academic/research setting, they feel that emphasizing their degree can come across as a sort of superior attitude working alongside a lot of talented people with various degrees (or lack thereof)—especially to the degree that whatever their thesis was in however many years ago may have next to nothing with what they do today.

I have no particular stake in the question though. Totally understand that people are proud of their achievement.


Yeah certainly, and even at university most lecturers I had I think were 'just call me (first name)'.

I just meant that I can't think of anything else at that level that we don't use (sometimes/to the same not-100% extent) an honourific for. In many countries (not North America I know) medicine is a lesser qualification (Bachelor of each Medicine & Surgery, MBBS or BMBS) but we still use it, so it seemed to me the argument up thread works there (Masters aren't called doctors) but not as far as I can think of anything at PhD level?


I don't think so. As you say, not any sort of Masters degree. And even though the standard JD for lawyers has "doctor" in it, no one calls anyone with a standard 3 year law degree "doctor." Obviously there are aristocratic and clerical titles as well--in addition to various certifications (though those don't usually have a prefix-type title--mostly positions like Judge do).

>Yeah certainly, and even at university most lecturers I had I think were 'just call me (first name)'.

Of course not all lecturers have doctorates and you also get into the very academia "Professor" sensitivity.


I didn't even know that I could put my Bachelor of Engineering degree next to my name, and from what I can tell on the Internet, putting it next to my name would be considered pretentious.


I've got a Bachelor of Science, so I'd be toast0, BS. Which seems appropriate, because putting a title like that feels like BS. It's in Computer Engineering, so I could be toast0, BSCE. But that feels pretentious.


Rincewind the Wizzard, BMgc, Unseen University.


>putting it next to my name would be considered pretentious.

Yeah, probably. I sometimes will list degrees in a longer bio but that's mostly because it may turn out I went to school with someone. They're not very relevant to anything I'd be talking about at a conference. I'd never put degrees and class years next to my name unless it were an alumni thing.

As I say, PhDs in a non-academia setting are what you see something of a split on with some people displaying them liberally and others never mentioning them.


Oh, MSEE would, I guess, finally solve the awkward question of “what do you use as a title if you have a masters degree,” haha.


It is the last degree, after all.

Lots of people (this will seem ridiculous to anyone who’s worked with academics, but) seem to mix up PhD’s, lecturers, and don’t know about the grueling path from there to full-on tenured professor.


It's always been a point of amusement for me; some sites get these incredibly long lists of titles, but you can only pick one. So, despite it all, folks like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would still be put out. And for example, when you pick "Reverend Mother" out of an airline website's dropdown list, they don't actually say "Reverend Mother" when they call your name over the PA.


"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same."

This is the way to go.

"The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here."

It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.

The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.

In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.


Agreed. Currently consulting for an org which is having this very debate; the consensus is leaning towards replacing FirstName/LastName with FullName (i.e how are you generally identified) and PreferredName (how do you like to be addressed).

Some additional observations from the German-speaking world (both Vienna and rural Austria):

- yes, we also often refer to people, even in everyday speech, as LastName FirstName

- often when referring to someone by name they are also given a definite article (equivalent of English "the"), e.g. "die Maria" or "der Gruber Hansi"

- some people I've encountered with a background in the German aristocracy (not Austrian, where such titles are technically abolished) have extremely long legal names with multiple prince/duke/von X und Y etc clauses. This will be their full legal name that appears in the passport and must be used when booking flights etc, but is not what they would use as "full name" in an everyday business context. So "Full Name" might not always be "Legal Name".

Also in a South Asian/Indian diaspora context, it is very common for people to be addressed by a semi-formal nickname that does not appear anywhere in their legal name. Come to think of it, I know one or two Austrian aristos* who use the same approach.

* yes, technically the aristocracy is abolished but they still live in their castles and know each other's pedigrees...


Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz


Germany used to be extremely restrictive about the set of character sequences that were allowed as given names. Some of that is probably still in place. When everybody was called Fritz or Hans or Gundula plus some word describing an ancestor's profession (it's all following the pattern of Smith and Miller), the order didn't really matter and that freedom was liberally abused: contexts that use the formal as identifier (Schmidt, Müller) and the given name only as a tie-breaker on collision will happily put the family name first, despite the reverse being specified in the terms themselves (Vorname and Nachname translate to pre, post, they really don't leave anything open to interpretation).

But those informal regional order conventions? I read them as formalized disrespect for the individual: "you're not Hans who happens to be a Müller, you're a Müller who happens to be Hans. And the Müllers, they are part of us, so subsume!" Those regional things can be quite peculiar: a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her family took over, at some point between the thirty years war and the industrial revolution.


When I was a child in Bavaria I was often called by house name + given name, in that order, especially by the elderly. The house name is different from the family name which appears in official documents like the birth certificate.

Another difference between northern and southern Germany is the Münchner-Du and the Hamburger-Sie. In standard German we use the formal pronoun Sie with the last name in formal situations and the informal pronoun Du with the given name in informal situations. Nowadays in semi-formal situations, like between colleagues at work, it's completely informal but two or three decades ago it wasn't. Officially the workplace was supposed to be formal and often it was, but in many cases a mixture between formal and informal forms was common.

In the north people tended to use the formal Sie but in conjunction with the given name, like Markus, können sie bitte das Auto holen." (Marcus, can thee get the car, please.), whereas in Bavaria the opposite combination of informal Du combined with the family name was prevalent, like *"Du, Frau Müller, kannst Du bitte das Auto holen." (You, Mrs. Miller, can you get the car please.)


> Marcus, can thee get the car, please.

Two notes:

First, you'd use "thou" here, as it's the nominative case, and the correct conjugation would be "canst".

Secondly, "thee" and "thou" were very much the form used to speak to a close friend or social inferior in early modern English. "You" functioned more like French "vous" or German "Sie"- as either a plural formation or a formal address of a social superior.

With that in mind, it would probably be more accurate to say that they should be rendered "Marcus, can you get the car, please?" and "Mrs. Miller, canst thou get the car, please?" And notice the parallel between "canst thou" and "kannst Du"!


Thank you, I wondered when I wrote it, if its that simple and if I should try to given an English equivalent at all, but did't have time to research it. Your comment saved me from that.


Aren't those name/pronoun mismatches in both cases a clear expression of status gradient? "I consider you close but I certainly don't consider you a peer". I suppose that neither of those drivers would reply in similar form. (though far less unlikely in the munich variant I think). An exception would be a recurring pattern of ironically using the family name like a nickname in youth language. Perhaps male only youth language, but very much an entirely different thing from those Munich/Hamburg oddities.


I'm from Bavaria, so can only really speak about the Munich version with some confidence, and I think it is usually used symmetrically. The German Wikipedia entry about the Hamburger-Sie specifically discusses the status gradient, so you definitely have a point there. Maybe it is even true for the Munich version and I just never heard it used like that.


>sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her

That has a very "part of the crew, part of the ship" feeling to it. Work the land, become the land, you're named for the land that you work! With marital status, who your father was, your family's occupation, and where you're working, all in a name, résumés needn't be a thing.


> a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order.

I disambiguate my grandparents via the name of the farmhouse they live in, rather than the last names. I am from austria. But I dunno how common that is.


> "Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same."

> This is the way to go.

Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?


For one thing, delivery drivers and similar can get confused if they don't know which part of the name they should expect on the doorbell... (especially if both parts of your name are uncommon)

I don't think there's an easy fix to this. Not everyone has a first and a last name, but in many places, cultural conventions (or legal practice) assume that you do.


Sorting. Though I don't think there's a culture-agnostic way to do this, either.


Not universally, no. The closest for English-language use is to put a spurious comma between family and given name (e.g., "Cixin, Liu" for Cixin Liu).

In an ebook management system I've been developing, I use a full_name and a sort_name field for authors/editors/contributors, because books are a reasonable thing to want to sort by author names.


Even this has some culturally confusing elements, doesn't it?

For example, in my studies I had cause to read many books by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."


> Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."

I'm pretty sure I've seen a by-name sorting scheme that excludes these sorts of prefixes for alphabetisation purposes. Of course, then you have to second guess whether you are using such a sorting system :)


I believe that the von should be included in sorting in some languages and not in others. It's a Dutch/German difference, though I cannot recall which is which.


Even this has some culturally confusing elements, doesn't it?

It's never not going to.


Largely cultural, I think, and being able to use each as might be appropriate within the culture. For example, using "Hi, <first name>" when sounding casual, but using "Dear Ms <last name>" when trying to sound formal. Nothing that's likely to be mission-critical, but a natural inclination based on cultural upbringing that we may not even realize is affecting our product design.


People already mentioned sorting.

Another reason is being able to generate various forms automatically: i.e. from "Fstname:William Robert, Lstname:Smith" to generate "William Robert Smith", "W.R. Smith", "Bill Smith", or just "Bill" without storing any of these variants separately.

Of course this may fail if "William" prefers to be called "Will", not "Bill"...


Interfacing with external systems which require first/last, I suppose.


This, we recently had to break up our "name" field into first/last name because we work with banks that require first/last name as separate fields. When we reference an account it has to match their records exactly.


This. Many US government agencies (and therefore their forms and APIs) use FML.

So, our software has a whole pile of names... FML, preferred, mailing, formal, sort name, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. It's a mess.


If you mean for yourself, yes. Do you want to have an easy time when you interact with a reality that assumes things about you, or do you want to spend a lot of time and effort accomplishing basic tasks as an outlier in a system that doesn't expect you? If you mean for your database, it depends on purpose. The same reality applies. Think about integration, for example.


Having to interact with other systems that expect first and last names to exist.


> In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first

It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.

In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.


Roman naming conventions[1] technically did have a personal first name that came first and was called that: first name or forename is a reasonably direct translation for praenomen. The complexity is that by the late republic praenomina were largely from such a small set of names that they were not particularly useful to distinguish anyone, and they became somewhat of a formality that would often be omitted.

Julius Caesar has the 'group/last' name first because it doesn't include his first name at all: including it he would be Gaius Julius Caesar. The cognomen (there Caesar), meanwhile, was a bit of an inconsistent mess that in various times and contexts could be personal, hereditary, honorific, given, adopted...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions


Hereditary cognomina were used to distinguish different major branches of large, powerful clans. Some sort of device to specify which subbranch of an enormous group you're talking about appears to be necessary in every place that has such enormous groups; in imperial China, then as now, vast swathes of the population were covered by just a handful of surnames, but the practice developed of referring to notable families by a combination of their name and the location where they were dominant.

So Caesar's close relatives were all also called Caesar, which is how it got to be an imperial title. You might think that with the original cognomen locked into place for such families, members would get a second cognomen so that there would be at least one part of their name that could identify them. But apparently not.


Some famous people got additional names, agnomina, such as "Africanus". And Roman emperors were later known for inflationary use of such designations. You could run a minor campaign on the Rhine and call yourself Germanicus for example.

The whole part about the Roman naming system indicating heritage became even more complicated when Caracalla (properly named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) made every free man in the Empire a Roman citizen and now basically everyone was called "Marcus Aurelius" without ever having had any ties to the Aurelii family.


They _sometimes_ did, I think. Here's one (non-Julian) example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Caecilius_Metellus_Num...


Roman naming conventions were very different from current Italian ones, and Caesar's full name was Gaius Julius Caesar, where Gaius is the closest thing to what we would call a first name. If he had some brothers, they would all have been "Julius Caesar", and only the praenomen would have distinguished them. For example, Julius Caesar's father was also named Gaius Julius Caesar, and had (most likely) a brother whose name was Sextus Julius Caesar.


> It's probably a Roman thing.

There is very likely no connection. The introduction of surnames in Germany took place in the 15th century (somewhat earlier in German speaking parts of Switzerland). In Franconia, the "ethnic" distinct northern part of which is today Bavaria and which was never a part of the Roman empire, the last-name first custom also occurs in a few places such as Bamberg.


The Romans weren't but Napoleon was, so maybe it is more of an indirect Roman influence?


In Poland informally it’s always <given name> <last name>. Formally, it depends most places are on the same as informal, but particularly military and some other bureaucracies will use <last name> <given name>. I always thought this is a holdout from the pre-computer days to make it easier to sort alphabetically (last names are a bit better distributed than the popular first names).

In France they seem to prefer <LAST NAME> (yes, all caps) <First name> even for less formal things.


I've seen this in Czech too - sometimes lastname first but maybe more in old-school things. I think I'm registered with the Czech FA as "McSurname Sean" :-D

Also this "reversal" had me confused when we hosted a French exchange student without knowing French (I spoke German, but the teachers knew my family were happy to host if they needed). His name was written like "KHALID Mohamed" and he was very polite so he didn't really correct me when I was calling him "Khalid", and since I was unfamiliar with Algerian names I had experience to suggest "Khalid" was more surname-y than firstname-y. It sorted itself out after a day or two though :-)


Not sure how it is done in other countries, but it's very likely that the custom of using the last name in all caps exists elsewhere. AFAIK, it comes from the fact that some last names are also common first names, so it's easier to distinguish between the two like this, as the order isn't really that important. For example, if I see a DIDIER Bernard or a Bernard DIDIER, I know I need to call him M. Didier in a formal context or just Bernard in an informal one.


I've seen the capitals convention to designate family names in several places, like with people from East Asian countries corresponding in English. The point is to take away ambiguity about which name order is being used and therefore how to address the writer.


> In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.

Only that... it didn't? The vast majority of bureaucracy and even many private entities in Italy use and strongly prefer the "Surname Birthname" format.


Gaius (also written Caius) was his given name, Ivlivs (Julius) the family name, Caesar the cognomen.

In inscriptions (short): CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR

In speaking he would (in English;)) rather formally introduce himself as "Gaius of the Iulii, called Caesar".

His mother called him Gaius, his peers called him Caesar once he got or choose?) this name.


Wouldn't Ceasar be much closer to his last name,though? It's definitely not his personal nickname.

His father was 'Gaius Julius Caesar' his grandfather (supposedly the first 'Ceasar') was 'Sextus Julius Caesar'.

The Cognomen is presumable something that evolved as a way to tell apart people belonging to different branches of the same family/clan because the number of first names was very limited.


I stand corrected: in case of Caesar, it was already hereditary in his family.

Initially, it was more of a nickname or even an earned name, like with Caesars contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognomen


> Magnus

Nicer than his other nickname 'adulescentulus carnifex ("teenage butcher") ' I guess..

But yeah, the cognomen seems weird/hard to understand e.g. Pompey's dad was called Strabo but he seems to have never used that name himself, while other like Ceasa, Metellus or Cicero were pretty much just surnames.

Romans probably found their naming system as confusing as we do so they started using nicknames ad hoc.

It was even more awful if you were a woman, you technically didn't even have your own name until the imperial period. You and your sisters would just be called Aemilia I, Aemilia II, III etc (or the 'elder'/'younger'). if your father was belonged to the Aemilius clan for example...


Same thing in Hungary.


In Hungary it's also last name first, both officially and informally - not sure if it's some Asian influence or something else...


France as well

I believe that it's mostly the English speaking world that is strict with having "first name" first and "last name" last.

It's not an Asian cultural feature to have family name first, but it's an English speaking thing to have it last.

OP isn't trying to use his software in Asia specifically. He's just adapting to non US market.


In the English-speaking world (or at least in the USA) we sort by last name, so any list of names you get is always last, first. For that reason many forms (though not all) will have the last name as the first thing you fill in.


French uses the same convention as English. First then last. No one would ever say, or write, "Macron Emmanuel est le président de la France".

In languages like Japanese or Hungarian, that's what family name first means.


If you were writing a letter to him, though, you might put his name on the envelope as MACRON Emmanuel.


For the record, traditional Indian names are far more complicated.

Consider the name of a famous violinist, Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman Radhakrishnan, also known as Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan. From a Western perspective, 'Lalgudi' isn't strictly a 'name' per se: it is a toponymic surname, and is the name of a taluk (or administrative subdivision: it is a third-order division after state, and district) in Tamil Nadu.

Gopala is an avonymic, i.e. his grandfather's name, and Jayaraman is a patronymic, his father's name. His given name is Radhakrishnan, but frequently rendered as Krishnan.


I wish we had world culture education as a part of grade school, including things like how to address people / naming conventions. I've learned a lot (and continue to) in the last 10-15 years through working with people and reading things in dribs and drabs, but it'd have been nice to know these things before I needed them and not ad hoc.


Thanks for the clarification. Not that familar with Indian names, and interesting to know it's as complicated as others.


Many Indonesian Javanese people only have a single name. It is more rare these days, but certainly not zero, or only old people who don't use computer. I've met people in their 20s with a single name.

Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?) As a result, most will write their romanized family name in all uppercase. Then, it can easily be identified as first or last. The easiest place to see it is in movie credits. When the screen is full of romanized Korean names, you see a mix of family name in all upper as first or last.

South Indian names can be incredibly long. Many people will shorten to use a single character from either first or last name.

Just have a single free text field. That should work for all cultures. Allow for 64 chars minimum (hello Spaniards!) and possibly 128 chars. Also, you might try a second field for "nick name". Lots of people with very long names use a shorter form in less formal settings.


> Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?)

In Korean, the family name comes first, then the given name. (There are no middle names.) It is almost always a single-character surname (Kim, Lee, etc.) and a two-character given name, though there are exceptions, with a small minority of surnames being two characters, and a small minority of given names being one character.

Romanization rules have changed over the years. The first president of the modern Republic of Korea was Syngman Rhee, with his given name Syngman first (with no spaces or hyphens) and family name Rhee last. Then take Park Chung Hee, the third president, in office in the 60s and 70s; his family name is Park, and his given name is Chung Hee. A few presidents later, you have Roh Tae-woo, in office around the 90s, with family name Roh and given name Tae-woo; notice the hyphenation. The current president is Yoon Suk Yeul, back to not having a hyphen to join the two characters of his given name.

Sometimes it depends on when it was that someone was first issued a passport, because the government is loathe to change the way someone's romanized name is spelled after the first issuance.


> with a small minority of surnames being two characters

I was confused for a long time when I saw the name of Namkoong Min, I thought they wrote it reversed for some reason. Now that he's in the news again, I realized Namkoong 남궁 is the family name -- never seen one like this before.


I used to know an American guy in Amsterdam who only had a single name. His explanation was always that his parents were a bit weird. It was a short 4-letter name too. He might well be in the running for the shortest name ever.


I recall seeing an article once about someone immigrating with a single character name having to basically pick a name as the IT systems didn't allow it


Some weird names I've seen in the real world are "Boy" and "Baby"


I've got a coworker called Boy. I also remember something on TV with a recurring character called Boy. This is in Netherland, so maybe the fact that it's a foreign word makes it a bit more acceptable?


This is what I usually do if I need the name at all, but sometimes you need to interface with systems that need that data split.

A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal. Using the full name feels off.

In my case, it was to address a resignation notice, so it was a bit of a nitpick with no legal consequences. However in other cultures and scenarios it can matter a lot more.


I think to address your politeness questions, it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language. I come from a country right next to germany and addressing a person with a gender specifier like Frau would be seen as extremely old fashioned and potentially sexist.

So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree the app is localized.


Even in Germany you can work around it. It's necessary for a third gender option, or when the gender is not known.

I imagine that it's not France either? French has similar greetings, with the same indecisiveness around the polite/casual pronouns. There's the added challenge of Quebec where casual pronouns are far more commonly used.

There's also the trap of "mademoiselle" which is no longer used because we no longer care about a woman's marital status. It's the same as with Fraulein.

You are right that rules might need to be made by country. The beauty of small scale solutions is that you can sweat small things like this instead of applying Silicon Valley sensibilities to the entire world.


Honestly, just do it the manual way. Have three free-form fields: "Full Name", "Preferred Name", and "Formal Address". Yes, it'll mean more typing, but it's the only way to deal with several cultures.


> it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language.

Even this presents problems, as countries like Singapore have multiple overlapping cultures with unique naming conventions. Likewise, India encompasses many languages and even unique naming conventions within those languages.


Which country is that? And how would you address a person called Martina Müller in a written document? "Sehr geehrte Müller?" Or is it not a German-speaking country you're referring to?


Even "sehr geehrte Müller" already includes the gender (it would be "sehr geehrter" for a man), so if you want to avoid the whole situation, you have to go informal, and indeed, I have received a lot of emails recently which start with simply "Hallo [firstName] [lastName]" (which I guess is still more formal then only "Hallo [firstName]").


Sure, but in a more formal setting you wouldn't address somebody with "Hallo Martina". So my question is how would you avoid the Herr or Frau in a formal setting?


It turns out the people who want to be addressed by neutral gender usually don't care as much about Siezen and honorifics, so the systems I built usually just go with "Hallo" or "Moin". I even had one system which would go with "Sehr geehrte/r" for people who had chosen a title or set their language preference to "Deutsch (Sie)" and with "Moin" for everyone else.


Moin is not a good way to address your Ausländerbehörde case worker though. I'd go for the more disarming Hallöchen Popöchen.


Is it not a similar issue in the US or UK? In a formal setting, e. g. communication from a company representative to an unknown (except for the name) representative from a different company, I would be using "Dear Ms./Mr. <last name>". If that is the correct way (please let me know!) you have to commit to one of only two genders and sometimes also the last name is a guess.


You could say Dear Firstname Lastname without being off.


It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles. Every country has their own interface standards and it is always educational to dig in to that for a bit to get acquainted with the local customs so you don't end up making some kind of faux pas. And sometimes those standards are very fluid, someone calling you 'Sir' may do so in a mildly sarcastic manner to get the point across, they don't necessarily believe you to have been knighted. And some people use access to their given name(s) as something to be granted explicitly, even though the company phone book spells out their first name and others are equally offended when you address them by their family name.

It's a minefield!


Actually, the stereotype among Germans is that Austrians are even more fond of their titles, although I think that has decreased in both countries in the last decades.

The "addressing people by their first name and using Du instead of Sie" is indeed handled very differently in different companies. I consider myself lucky to work for a company where "Du" and first name is the rule, so I don't have to keep an internal list of colleagues which I can use "Du" with...


Sir-itis is particularly endemic to the Philippines, in no small part thanks to call center scripts. At one point we had a company driver who insisted (quite seriously, no sarcasm involved) on calling his passengers Sir Firstname.


I'd rather say it comes from the Spanish Don, as it is used not as a title but in formal occasions, together with the given name.


> It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles.

Seeing all the title drop down when subscribing to the economist (UK) made it clear to me it is a thing there too, at least in some circles.


Some profile managers or registration forms in European sites asked me how I want to be addressed, including a menu with Mister, Doctor, PhD etc. American sites usually have at most name, middle name and family name and mails start with Dear Name. English is easy because Dear is OK for all genres. Other languages need a different word for male and female people so their either end up collecting personal information that they wouldn't need for the service they are offering or they have to find some impersonal way to address you.

An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.

So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.

Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.


One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when corresponding with them.

That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.


That's another way to do it but I can see at least a couple of downsides:

1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others.

2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL.

Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason.

I give an example that covers all those points:

Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously.

Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.


This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .


> you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person.

No it doesn't. Just ask how they want to be addressed. You can't encode all the possible variants, not everyone in Germany will want to be addressed in that way even if they are both a woman and a doctor.


> A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person?

This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.


It was a bit trickier in my case because it was an English tool to fill a German form. There was the awkward issue of "Frau Dr." and "Herr Dr." being the same thing in the English dropdown.

The other issue is that the full name is used in the address, but only the last name in the greeting. There are no apartment numbers in Germany, so the name in the address must match the name on the mailbox. There can also be a lot of "Herr Müller" working at the same address.

In the end I opted for Mr/Mrs/Other + first and last name, and dropped the title. It's good enough for this purpose, but it shows how tricky something like a name can get, especially if the person filling the form is not aware of all this.


Having not been in this position myself, my instinct is to drop the greeting line in emails altogether. I’m sure you considered that and had a good reason not to drop it.


I personally find it somewhat rude, unless it's a follow up message or someone I know very well.

To give a bit of context I help people as a courtesy when the information on my website does not suffice. If readers can't be arsed to say hello before they ask for a few minutes of my time, I quietly wonder who raised them. Imagine walking up to a retail employee and blurting out "I need printer paper" without saying "hello" or "excuse me".


As a general case, you can ask for the full name in the printed order as the user wishes and ask for a preferred calling name, in this case "Frau Dr. Musterfrau", then problems solved!


In most cases you don't even need the users real name.

If I sign up for an account, but the invoice is going to the billing department of my company, why do you care what my real name is?


> why do you care what my real name is

Because the billing department verifies bills before paying them, and needs to know who to ask about the bill?


That's an internal matter. The supplier needs to include the customer's order number anyway or no one in the company will know how to deal with the invoice. That number will be linked to the person who raised the order.


What if you mistype the order number, or forget to provide it? Or when an employee makes a small order that they can just pay immediately with a corporate credit card without first getting approval? Or when a customer pays for something with their personal card and gets reimbursed later by the company? It just makes life a lot easier for everyone involved when the name of the person who made the order is printed on the invoice.

And if people really don't want the supplier to know their name, they just type "IT Procurement" into the name field.


A little suspicion I get from this post is it sounds like they have bunch of users under believable names in English, as well as many name-sounding local names that may or may not have to do with names, and they want to regularize the hell out of it to real names only, and looking into coding a machine readable data scheme to enforce a policy.

Otherwise there should be not a lot of reasons to parse and format Asian names, as suggested plenty times over here. If the incoming invoice has to go through legal checks first, the requirement shall be as codified and supplied, whether it's that the name shall be written back to front or in purple on red.

Maybe I'm just overthinking, likely I am.


If the name on a bill to my company does not match the name of the employee who ordered the product, the bill will certainly not be paid.


Do you not use POs? Much easier, allows you to approve spend if necessary and means the person paying I voices doesn't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of your employees and keep up to date with which ones have ledt


POs seem to be very rare in Europe, people who even know what's a PO are rare.


That's far from my experience. Where in Europe and for what kind of payments?

I only use POs with my customers. I'm based in Sweden, doing work mostly in Germany, Switzerland, and England, as software sales and contract work. No one has even blinked.

In Swedish it's called a inköpsorder, but often abbreviated PO.

As an example, https://www.betydelse-definition.com/ink%C3%B6psorder has "Inköpsordern (ofta säker man PO som är kort för Purchase Order) är det viktigaste dokumentet i en inköpsverksamhet och är ett avtal mellan två parter. POn definierar vad som köps in och under vilka villkor och förutsättningar."

In English: "The purchase order (often said PO, which is short for Purchase Order) is the most important document in a purchasing operation and is an agreement between two parties. The PO defines what is bought in and under what conditions and requirements."

Looking around, here's a description of purchase order use in the UK: https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/guide-to-purchase-orders...

> Purchase orders are a helpful part of the procurement process, allowing business owners to keep track of incoming orders and to monitor stock levels. It’s a way to see exactly what money is being spent where and at what moment. In some cases, purchase orders are a basic requirement for doing business. Many government agencies and authorities insist upon PO forms being issued before they’ll agree to settle an invoice.

It wasn't hard to find similar examples for other European countries.


If you don't need a legal name, a "name" field suffices.

There are plenty of situations where you need their full legal name as per passport or other form of identification. In here it's often some form of anti-money laundering laws. The first time I came across it was for a game show where you could win money, but to take the money out of the app, the law required some legal identification.


There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names


Nice, although the pertinent quote is:

"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."


I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”.

Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated.

Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.


The point is that First Name and Last Name do not correspond to Family Name and Given Name, which is actually what is desired (you can start an email to me as "Hello <Given Name>", and be reasonably sure of avoiding insult. You can't do that with "Hello <First Name>", you will definitely insult some people).

However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.


I used to use this as a mild form of spam detection, like people do with "+" email aliases, by adding something to the "what do you want us to call you?" field that was specific to the site.

Then, if I started getting spam to that name, I knew who sold me out.

It was especially useful for physical spam mail that wasn't coming to an email address. I discovered quite quickly which magazine gave all my info to every company that wanted it.


In German, you have to ask the customer whether they want to be addressed in the formal way “Sehr geehrter Herr Schmidt” (esteemed Mr. Schmidt might be an approximate translation, of course this sounds totally off in English) or the informal way “Hallo Paul”, or maybe they prefer “Lieber Paul” (dear Paul) or even “Lieber Herr Schmidt”! Note that the formal and informal ways use different parts of the name. So if the website asks me for my name, then I have to rub my crystal ball to figure out which style the company intends to use.


I know that human Germans have problems with knowing when to "du" someone, so how the hell is a website is supposed to know?


Okay but say a person with an East Asian name fills out your form and dutifully fills out your form with their name in reverse. i.e. if their name is the Chinese equivalent of “Smith John”, they fill it out as given name: John, family name: Smith. Aren’t you going to be rendering their name in the wrong order for all your interactions? How do you know which order to concatenate it?


This is why you'd use the single "what do you want to be called?" value (e.g. preferred_name). Then it's not an issue because it's the exact text they provided.


You're mixing up multiple problems. If adding problems is what you want, none of my highschool classmates called each others in the "John" part of anyone's names, and emails beginning with a "Hello $firstname" in my language sounds weird to me anyway. But first/last names are often reused for billing and official purposes, so East Asian(CJK) users would know to fill the "first" with given and "last" with family name if asked that way for official purposes, no matter the visual order or how will it be used. If it's not for official purposes, people are just going to throw in random junks anyway.


I think the point is it's a single field so you don't do any concatenation


This. There's two separate concerns: what you call them, and their "official" name.

What you call them is always better done as a separate single field, rather than trying to concatenate the official name fields.


In some languages ”family name” maybe confusing. E.g . in Polish it sometimes (often) mean maiden name (women traditionally replace or add to their last name the last name of their husbands).

So the “pre-marriage” name is referred to as: - “nazwisko panieńskie” (maiden name) - or “nazwisko rodowe” (literally this is “family name”)


The point isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve.

Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required.

Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last, but you're always going to run into something from the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list so unless you can get away with just a single "name" field (and you can't always) it's the better option of the two.


The original sin is assuming that names have a particular structure. But at least First/Last places the burden of that sin not on the user.

My partner has only given names. When forms ask for their “Family name”, my internal thought process goes like this:

1. WTF do I write here?

2. Why are they asking for Family name? Oh they are probably just Anglophone and assume this is how names are.

3. It’s okay, just lie on the form then.

Then I choose their final given name and write it in the family name field.

This kind of enforced microdishonesty grates on the user over time. It certainly makes me grumpy!

First and last name is better because it’s not imposing a structure that may not exist. The burden of that false structure goes on the service rather than the user.


First and last is worse because having first name registered as family name adds extra half a day to your schedule to be spent around support desk, and given/family nomenclature exists because it's just unnecessary pain.

Your partner and billion others from their cultural sphere with single-field name system is a testament that concatenated two-field name system is the problem and is actually not working due to the falsehoods, not that the first/last nomenclature is better than given/family which is much less ambiguous.


Yes, this. Given/family may be bad, but first/last is so much worse.


unfortunately, I need to remember which one of first and last name is family name... I always directly search.


> Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last,

I dunno. The former places the cognitive load on the user. The latter places no additional cognitive load on either party.

After all, what exactly do you mean by "Family Name" and how sure are you that meaning you have is shared by even a significant minority of cultures and people? How many countries have passports that label each name in the name field as a "given" name or a "family name"? How many countries have their revenue service care about whether a "given" name is to be used or a "family" name?

OTOH, to figure out which name is first and which name is last, all the user has to do is look at their ID, which they have presumably seen thousands of times already.

First/last at least has the benefit that, to the user filling in the form, they don't have to think about it - the first name on the ID goes first, the last name on their ID goes last. They can leave out anything in the middle because the form didn't ask them for it!

The problem isn't the NAME, the problem is the addressing of that person which can be only be solved by by adding a field for addressing, and where it can't be solved (titles, honorifics, etc), then given/family name won't solve it either.


> I dunno. The former places the cognitive load on the user. The latter places no additional cognitive load on either party.

It adds cognitive load because I've not seen a system where first/last name is not a synonym for given/family name, except it also indicates the system designer is not aware of alternative ordering for names and is forcing me to decide between correct order/incorrect semantic vs. incorrect order/correct semantic, so it's always a game of guessing what the system will subsequently try to display my name as if I enter it in a certain way.


You don't have to guess. There's an ordering of your names on your ID.

Use that. I'd be surprised if if is different to the one used by your country's revenue service.

If the taxman in your country both knows who you are and has a name for you, that's the correct name, regardless of whether unspoken rules about given/family/calling names exist or not.


So far the consensus of HN hive mind seems you should just give everyone a mandatory nick and optional full name fields and bypass all the formatting issues. It shouldn't be important if situation allows that.

With that said, the idea behind that recommendation is that, the "first" and "last" names in American mind corresponds to, or SHALL correspond to, the European idea of given names(Gates III or John or Jong-Il) and family names(father's name, name of their home communal village of The Vincis, or whatever for greater identities of an individual) respectively, rather than simply being the 1st and 2nd items of your `struct name` in either cases of American name orders and Asian name orders in use, and hence relevant forms for names SHALL be so marked clearly to avoid systems falsely identifying you with your community identifier that comes first in your culture. Doing this makes sense for this context and purpose.


I have a friend who just married a Burmese girl of Indian origin and she just had a single name 'Jennifer'


Slack does this and I don't like it. I have Hungarian colleagues and some (but not all!) of them have entered the family name first.

I always feel awkward responding to them, because I don't know if I'm typing `Hello $FIRSTNAME` or `Hello $LASTNAME`.


This is why you should always ask for a preferred name. There’s lots of reasons why people don’t use their legal given name; I use my middle name and get annoyed when forced to use my first name. Many societies (ex: Thailand) use nicknames instead of legal given names.


Don't say hello, just state your business.


You are being downvoted, but I wonder if people really appreciate the politeness on automated communication. If no person interacted with me, why would I want to be addressed respectfully? I think this mainly serves corporations which can humanize automated communication to make customers feel more cared about (by simulating interaction like a real human would initiate)


It depends on how it's done. If it's part of the real message then it's easily ignored and no harm done, if it's a separate message then it wastes the time of whoever is on the receiving end (especially if they wait for a response before sending the real message).


I believe it makes the experience more pleasant (at least for neurotypical people), but it'simportant to not overdo it. It shouldn't add friction or subtract from clarity.


Thank you!

Mandatory reference to nohello.net/en/


That's about something else entirely. You are not supposed to write "Hello" and then wait for a reply making asynchronous communication synchronous.

Starting a full message with your request/business with a greeting is basic decency with no harm.


Clickable: https://nohello.net/

Clickable English: https://nohello.net/en/


I here this trope so much. It is tiring and closed-minded. Are you Western culture and male? Probably. I have seen whole blog posts dedicated to this matter. Really? This matter is so stressful that people need to write 100s of words about it? Sheesh.

Are you aware that it is polite to start a convo with people from South Asia with a small greeting? They wait for you to ack. If you don't ack, they will not continue.

It is an important part of intercultural communication to continuously adapt to different communication styles.

Why don't people write a tiny chatbot that applies to certain users? When the person says: "Hello." The bot can reply: "Hello!" It seems easy enough.


Also some cultures put the pressure of communication on the listener.

Say, you're in the same town as a friend and want to meet them. The American approach might be to ask, "Hey, I'm in town. Want to hang out?" The sender has done their job of delivering a clear message.

But some cultures would just say, "Hey, I'm in town."

That removes the pressure from the other person to say no, I don't want to see you.

You can also bat it back and say, "Joe's is a nice place to eat if you like burgers," which hints that you're available to have lunch together, but it could also mean a polite "ok".

But the ack is there to make sure the other person is paying attention before delivering the message, so they don't misinterpret it.

I don't necessarily think one is better. TCP vs UDP. If it's an important message, an American might still say, "We have to talk."


> They wait for you to ack. If you don't ack, they will not continue

Which is possibly one of the (admittedly probably very minor) reasons why they were left so far behind economically. Focusing on form over function in communication can be very counterproductive.

Not that I'm saying that saying "Hello, how are you?" to someone is waste of time. However certain people/cultures really go overboard with this and expected outsider to comply with these norms when they have much better things to do is not the most sensible idea.


Who decides which side should do the adapting?


Oh, that one's easy.

You are entitled to no adaptation from others. Your reactions to their "errors" are your problem, and your responsibility, although of course you can choose to start a fight over whatever you want.

On the other hand, if you do not adapt to them, sometimes they will choose to start a fight over it, or be offended, or whatever. As such, if you want to improve your social outcomes, consider allocating energy to adapting to others.

See? Simple. No centralized decision-making necessary. Each person can ruin their own life however they choose.


This genuinely misunderstands people from internal-only diverse cultures like Mainland Chine and India where they make frequent social faux pas yet are convinced they could never be uncomfortable or offensive to other cultures because "my country is so diverse!". If I had one Euro for each I heard that, I would be richer.


My general rule: If you are from an externally diverse cultural then you need to adapt to non-diverse cultures (Japan Korea etc) or internal-only diverse cultures (South Asia, Southeast Asia). If you cannot adapt to other cultures, then what is the point of working in a multicultural setting?


Do you want to talk or do you want information? Asking a question gets you the requested information when I respond, and a Hello is a request to talk.

Asking for a hello is holding the information until I'm engaged, at which point we should just meet for 5 minutes because it will be faster.


You can do `Hello @TheirSlackHandle`.


Or 'Hello Comrade Software Engineer/{x}' if you want to make it extra awkward.


I find that annoying when colleagues do that because it double notifies me, once for the message and once for the @


This is what I do too. Basically, we are deflecting the awkwardness and/or blame to the software.


Assuming the other end has filled in what Slack calls Display Name (which I interpret as "preferred name", is heavily implied by Slack's UI, and I think most people will too) … then you've addressed them as they prefer. (And if not, they can change it, and it instantly updates!)

I mean otherwise it's like literally any other communication medium, and you'll have to either take a culturally-appropriate respectful best effort guess at a preferred address, or just ask.


Or just "Hello, $reason_for_this_message"


That's less friendly.


Replace "Hello, $reason_for_this_message" with "Hello, $acceptable_level_of_polite_preamble; $reason_for_this_message", then.


I don't get what problem do all of you have with me saying "Hello Richie" to my colleagues.


Your director appreciates brevity over friendship.


No he doesn't.


It doesn't matter, it should always be `Hello $theirPreferredName`.


It should not. It should be "hello" and nothing else.


Like many folks in Latin America, I have two given names and two surnames (no hyphen). I run into IT systems that choke at my two surnames every now and then and it's a pain.

Introducing a hyphen isn't great: it doesn't match my legal name and it's awkward because some people do have a hyphenated surname plus another surname.

I've also met several people whose legal name doesn't include a surname.


> Like many folks in Latin America, I have two given names and two surnames (no hyphen). I run into IT systems that choke at my two surnames every now and then and it's a pain.

You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames.

So what does it say on your ID?

Your birth certificate if you have no ID?

Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?


> You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames.

Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name.

> So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID?

Same as my full legal name: A B C D.

> Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?

Well, there is no such thing as "my country" because I'm a dual citizen. Born in Spain, currently living in Canada as a naturalized citizen. That is where the troubles begin, because while in Spain IT systems typically assume people have two surnames, in North America they often assume a single surname.

So far it has not a problem when dealing with the various levels of the Canadian government, but for example my bank addresses me as A B C-D due to limitations in their IT infrastructure.

Incidentally, in Spain we are typically addressed as A C or Mr. C for brevity, while A B C D would be reserved for formal communications.

I hope this answers your questions.


> > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID?

> Same as my full legal name: A B C D.

Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there.

You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.


No, their full family name is C D. If you must abbreviate it, the correct address would be Sr C, not Sr D. There is no way that entering D in a "last name" field would be correct unless you're aiming for passive aggressive obstinacy.

To take a famous example: the full name of Rafael Nadal is Rafael Nadal Parera: one given name and two surnames, with the first surname taking precedence.


> Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there.

You are offering your own unique technical solution to a cultural problem that has already been solved, and while I admire your confidence, I must explain why it is incorrect.

I don't have a "last name", I have two surnames. The notion of "last name" implicitly assumes that there is one and only one surname.

As I already hinted at, people in Spain customarily use their first surname as their "last name". That's why 90% of communications address me as A C, even while living in Canada.

It is my understanding that the same rule is used in all of Latin America, including Brazil.


The difficult bit is how you sort them.

I have this problem that some software which doesn't readily discern what should be first name and what should be last name gives me a list of all Johns followed by all Lisas and then Peters, which is less than helpful. Other software thinks it got it right but then for Hungarian names, it gives me all Istváns followed by all Józsefs, which, again, is less than optimal.

Having a "sort key for bloody sorting" field may be a way to go, I personally would use it, but making it user friendly is a bitch, and heuristics will get it wrong more often than not. Sorry but I've run out of nice words for this problem.

(A bibliographer enters the chat, I cower in fear)


And don't forget people with just a single name. Filling in computer forms that require two names is the bane of my existence.


I would be interested to hear, how do you feel about simply entering "None" or something to that effect? I realize it may not be the literal correct version of your name, but do you feel like that is a reasonable compromise? I work with a system that makes exceptions for the circumstance you're talking about, but do wonder what you do in other platforms.

I would also mention that I feel your pain to a degree. My wife has an extremely uncommon female name, but the spelling is very close to a common male name. Many times she has run into people "fixing" her name for her without saying anything only for it to cause issues months later, or people calling her by the name they assumed she meant to type. It's incredibly aggravating to deal with. Lots of missed emails. Lots of phone calls of helpful people informing her of the "error".

At times, I wish the entire naming system were replaced with something that had no room for error or miscommunication. Everyone is called Larry or something.


How do you fly?

I had a friend with a single letter first name and the booking forms would never accept it, so he would add another couple of letters, but then at the airport he would be fucked because his ticket never matched his ID.

And how did you come by such a name?


We should emphasize the “preferred name” option because it can be very expensive & arduous to change a legal name. Also using real names in UI/messages should be considered a bad practice because you risk leaking info to shoulder snoopers or dead-naming folks that don’t want to expend the time/effort/money for a legal rename. Just don’t.


I feel like this is the way. If you want, include fields for all types of names (given, honorific, father's surname, whatever is imaginable) but also add the field "how should we address you" and use that for messages.

So:

* honorific surname: Sharifah * given name: Azizah * father's honorific surname: Syed * father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi * address me as: Zaphod Beeblebrox the 4th


It's not very useful to include most fields. Often parts of a name are not in use at all, unless you're doing legal identification. I'd never include my patronym where possible.


Yes, basically:

- one "full name" field. (English speakers would use Firstname Lastname) - one "how should we call you?" name. (English speakers would use their first name, in some other cultures people would preferred to be called by their last name)


this. and if they don't use latin alphabet,"local name" addition would really be nice. that's what my paycheck giver does.


Middle names are also equally important in the Philippines. The website that the OP included is lacking.

Either in the format:

- given-name middle-name surname

- surname, given-name (note there is no comma here) middle-name or middle initial


That's what we do, in our app.

People can write whatever they want, there, in whatever order they want. We only allow 255 characters, though, because we use classic VARCHAR, and index the field.

Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.

I support non-Roman character sets.


> Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.

Not only.

Argentinian national hero Manuel Belgrano had as full name Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano González.

Chilean painter Pablo Picasso's full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.


Oh, and make sure you can handle long names. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Blaine_Wolfeschlegelste....


Don't forget:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxx...


right - if you have a first name, last name and then switch on the locale you will have welcome text like Congratulations Rasmussen when I'm using a website while in Japan.


Would it be better to have "full legal name" and "preferred name"?

To clarify the purpose of the two


> SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name.

Really? Your parents named you the exact same name as a famous politician?

Edit: Really? Downvote me for the OP’s bad English?


The famous Singaporean politician Lee Kuan Yew to whom you refer was given the English name Harry by his parents. The poster you're quoting isn't themselves claiming to be LKY.


What does “Hated the name Harry and got it removed” meant then? Sounds like the poster got the name removed.

Also it was his grandfather that gave him the name “Harry”, not his parents.


There's no pronoun for that sentence, so it's left undefined who it's talking about. It doesn't mean the poster. It also doesn't really matter, if one former Singaporean politician dropped their "first name" then it's being used as an example that others may too.


It means that LKY himself stopped using the name Harry, for whatever reason. His (LKY) Wikipedia article states when, but not why - it cites his autobiography so that may be a useful source if you are interested to learn more.


The poster you're replying to is not claiming to be four different people or even any one of them, and your challenge does not contribute anything. In the case of Lee Kuan Yew, he did indeed drop Harry from his name, with varying stated reasons.

The fragment "Hated the name Harry and got it removed" probably means "[He] hated the name Harry and got it removed", not "[I] hated the name Harry and got it removed". The grammar is acceptable in many contexts.


Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet.

Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names.

Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything?

A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1 and either John Doe or something cute as default) And a Nickname or Display Name field if your app needs to show something on screen.


It's not just programmers. Plenty of genealogists, do things like automatically give a wife their husband's (male!) patronym. Even though they see it doesn't work that way in the sources, they seem to feel that it "should" work that way.


In France married women, if they let their guard down, will be given their husband's last name as "nom d'usage" upon almost any sign-up paperwork, without being asked, at least in my experience.

Nom d'usage technically has no legal value, it's just a last name you might want to be addressed as, normally that of your husband but it can be a pen name and whatever. It's optional, and technically only at the request of the relevant person. Men can have nom d'usage too (égalité, after all).

Still, immigration offices, banks, insurances... they often slap the husband's last name if that field is left empty, just because. Why would you want something else, right? She probably forgot!

We started crossing those fields to make it clear she doesn't want a nom d'usage.


Yes, it's really bad.

We actually couldn't open a joint bank account with both names separated. They'd accept the papers signed in the official names, but the names on the cards and other communication needed to be unified for their system to accept it. They'd accept to reemit card with the correct names only as an exception by abusing the card renewal system apparently


I assume you're talking about Société Générale? I've experienced that, and what's worse it's that's it's broken on purpose. A joint bank account doesn't require the people to be married, let alone to share names. But if they tick the married box, whoops, now it's suddenly mandatory.


To be fair, most of the stuff in "falsehoods programmers believe about $concept" lists are really falsehoods almost everyone believes. Software is just one of the places where the limits of those implicit beliefs might actually become apparent.

Most people never need to think about the details of how names might work in a different culture across the world, let alone work that into any kind of a rule-based mechanism or a rigid information model. If some random person working at a construction site in Europe or the US has no idea that first names and last names aren't a universal thing, that has exactly zero direct effect on anything. In most cases that's probably even true of lawyers or other high-level white collar work.

I'm actually inclined to believe lots of programmers know more about e.g. time [1] than a non-programmer Joe Random does on average, exactly because software developers may actually end up coming across at least some of those issues.

[1] e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...


This list would have been so much better with examples or a short explanation how or why the assumptions break in case it is not obvious. The author offers examples on demand [1] but while I would be interested to know them, it seems not important enough to bother the author. Maybe the author sees this comment and has some time to spare, then it could benefit everyone and not just one person asking.

[1] If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.


I live in Japan (as does Kalzameus), my name will regularly cause problems in computer systems. In fact, quite often I'm not using my name but what I am called in Japanese, and even then it will often fail. Number 1 problem - not enough characters, because most Japanese people only use a few characters for their entire name, don't have middle names, and don't have spaces in their names. And that's just for starters. Should I use what I consider to be my name, my full name, the name on my passport or the name on my residence card…?

It's just not that hard to find problems with name inputs.


Do you have to enter your name in Romaji or Katakana in Japanese sites?


It depends but it's usually going to be katakana. Sometimes it would specify what's written on your passport, or residence card. I've even heard talk of using half-width characters, which, luckily, I've not had the misfortune to use yet.


Someone else decided to write a follow-up with examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...


There are 4 main name forms that I often see:

* Full name (John Smith)

* Index name (Smith, John) - mostly for meatspace compatibility.

* Preferred name (John Smith) - used in lists with other people's names

* Personal name (John) - used in direct communications


Index vs. preferred name can get a bit wonky. I used to work on software that had a lot of attendee/speaker list functionality. Different types of customer had strong expectations about how names should be displayed and ordered, sometimes even in different contexts (attendees might be listed by last name but speakers by first, etc.). We had medical conferences where everybody would be listed as "Dr. Fredrica Bloggs, MD" but the sort order would be by last name. And that was just for English-speaking customers.


it is really something to be dealt with via locale settings but the lack of standardized data underlying what the locale logic would display really throws a wrench in things


The name used in direct communications can depend on the level of formality and on the context. For example, John / Mr. Smith / Dr. Smith.

Then there is the difference between the "full" name and the legal full name, with all names spelled out. The latter is sometimes necessary, but it can be awkward or inappropriate to use it in most places that expect a full name.


Is there an article showing a solution because listing problems is the easy part?

And maybe it's just me but

>because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.


In this case, "listing problems" - as you dismissively call it - takes a lot of care and effort, the article is a distillation of experience and knowledge that very few possess. It's up to you to use this understanding of the problem space to decide which aspects you're willing to trade off. The article's job is to help people make these tradeoffs consciously, instead of designing based on simplistic assumptions made in ignorance.


There is no "a solution" and never will be. Design your solution to be maximally relevant to your scenario and accept that it can't be perfect.


>>because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

>isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.

What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity?


>What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity?

I realize that someone is talking to me, but that has nothing to do with my identity. I doubt that that person and I have the same perception of who I am.


>..someone is talking to me..

I think the discrepancy here is just different definitions of the word 'identity'. If someone is talking 'to you' then you are identified by that. It's not about your unique internal world, but about your uniqueness among humans (like a primary key identifies a database row).


You don't refer to yourself in private by your own name?


Do you? I only say my own name when I’m introducing myself to someone.


On my own, I use my own name and pronouns. Not ever said or thought something like "Toutouxc, what are you doing?"


Nope, literally never. The idea of talking to myself using my own name is even a bit unpleasant, actually. I don’t have a bad name, I just don’t use it in my relationship with myself. Just like I know and like the name of my girlfriend, but I seldom address her by the name, we usually use the honey/love/baby equivalents.


What you are suggesting is talking in 3rd person. It is odd when someone does that.


To oneself, in private, you never or have never referred to yourself by your own name?


I had no part in choosing any of the names assigned to me at birth; I don't use them and don't particularly feel any attachment to them.


No, I refer to myself as I.

Without others I would never use my name.


> That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?

That made me laugh out loud. It's a great reminder why being conscious of the assumptions you make is an important part of development and one that LLMs can't really do.


Thank you for reminding me of this article!

More people designing applications need to read it.


And read this, you can learn a lot about names from it:

https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub/sevis-basics...


> No hyphens, apostrophes, or commas; except in the Preferred Name field

But my passport and drivers license both show my middle names hyphenated :(


This was also educational, thank you!


Very interesting however

>People have exactly one canonical full name.

What is on your passport then?


My passport has two of my names in both Ukrainian Cyrillic and Latinized form, neither of which is my full legal name per Ukrainian law. My id however has a legal full name in Cyrillic, but not in Latin. To make matters worse, the same set of Cyrillic characters can be represented by different Latin characters and it's somewhat up to me to decide how it's spelled when the document is issued. Since I can have more then one passport at the same time, the names in Latin don't even have to match.

Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.

In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.

add:

To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.


I can tell you that in my passport, my name appears in two different places and it's spelled differently been them.

Also, a lot of people in the world don't have passports.


I can also tell you that the passport office doesn't check anything very well, at least in the US, as my name on my passport doesn't actually match the name on my birth cert or SSN paperwork. I guess I mis-wrote it when I filled it out originally, but now I have to deal with how to get it fixed. For renewals, they only have a "my name changed" field, not a "you messed it up", so I've been ineffective at correcting the issue for years now.


> What is on your passport then?

In Ireland, it’s not entirely rare to use different forms of one’s name in Irish and English.

For example, in English our president would be called “ Michael Daniel Higgins”, but in Irish “Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn”, and while there’s obviously a correspondence between them, they are pronounced quite differently.

It’s possible to change the version of the name you use on your passport after six months of regular use (compared to two years for any other kind of name change), and in that situation both forms of your name will be listed on your passport.


What's on your passport may not be canonical. In some countries (Ireland and the UK, for instance) your name is, for practical (and generally legal!) purposes, whatever you use day to day; it wouldn't be _that_ uncommon for someone to have name X on their passport but have been going by name Y for years, and in this case name Y would probably be considered their legal name in most contexts.


I'm in that situation now, my UK passport/birth-certificate name is not the one I'm known by.

After several years of getting queried on mismatching ID, now I've moved to another country, I'm going through the process to "rename myself" - and mostly that's a matter of saying "Here's the name I've used for a long time, please make it official".

After the renaming goes through I'll be updating everything to match which will no doubt be a pain. But once it's done I'll have a much easier life.


Just as a really common anglo example, my passport has my middle name, but I will not otherwise use that name unless it's explicitly requested. Even airlines are inconsistent about this, so for most purposes I'm just Firstname Lastname.

At one point I had cards from two different banks, one with my middle name and one without.


> What is on your passport then?

See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.

For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.

I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.


My wife has an extra first name that she doesn't always use, and my mum has two different but both correct spellings of her name.


The magician Teller just has 'Teller' on his passport, and if you refer to 'Raymond Joseph Teller', people won't know who you're referring to.


Dual citizenship frequently results in different names in different passports.


Exactly. This is the case for my children.


If you obtain French citizenship you can "francify"[0] your name; you'll end up with two full canonical names. Nothing really forces you to change your original name in your original nationality.

[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10528


depends... which passport are you asking about?


I'm from Ireland, an English-speaking country in Western Europe. I have a name that is a typical Western name. In theory, I should be the happy path for any name system.

But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.

Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.

But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"

Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".

Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.

Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.

Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.

For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.

Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.

And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.


I lived in Asia for many years and worked with people from many places there.

It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).

There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.

There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

Finally there are people who go by a name which is not part of their legal name at all. Short forms like Bob instead of Robert, but also freeform names for various reasons, perhaps the most sensitive being that some government official may have determined their legal name contrary to their own wishes. Imagine your mother named you Sue but someone decided that must be short for Susan and put that on your government documents.

Related: when people want to show which part of their name is the family name, they either make it all uppercase or underline it. You can see this on some CVs but it happens elsewhere too when a full name is going to be read by people who don't know the addressee.


I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo <<first name>>!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. <<last name>>," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family and friends in that generation.

Is there a similar sentiment among older people in parts of Asia?


It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this.

Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain.

German companies often spend a non-trivial amount on software engineering time and data cleanup to get these things right. And the French take it even more seriously.

Non-native speakers may not understand it, but that's no excuse and you will alienate people and customers. Even younger generations notice.

And just fyi I'm a millennial and per "Du" with everyone I know. Not my telco provider though.


It's your personal preference to be addressed with _Sie_, but languages change and German is seeing shift to the use of _Du_ even for transactional business [1]. Target audience, region, familiarity etc. will all affect which word is used. Claiming the use of _Du_ in customer relationships as "wholly inappropriate" again is an expression of personal preference, not fact.

[1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/article233949947/firmen...


Isn't personal preference the entire point, though? If the aforementioned German aunt is offended enough by how a company addresses her, she might stop doing business with them. That's a loss for the company and is something they might want to think about. (Or maybe not, but who knows.)


It got a lot more common during Covid, the social distancing rules in Supermarkets etc. were often written with the informal "Du", I guess to foster a sense of community and "we're all in this together".


I have a personal preference for wearing clothes in public. I think people would rather that was respected, certainly in my case.


Not saying she's unreasonable for feeling that way - just wondering if this is also something that should be considered in Asia, too, and giving a bit of context for people who aren't familiar with Germany. I know that Japanese has an even more "complicated" (to non-native-speakers) grammatical distinction of familiarity, but not much more about it, and have even less idea about how it works in other Asian languages/cultures.

Knowing what name to display isn't always enough - you also need to think about how the rest of the text around it should be translated to match. For German, the safe answer is still third-person plural Sie, unless you're absolutely certain your audience are all children, and missing that distinction might be taken by your audience as either that you're trying to be creepily over-familiar, or that you think they're children.

A sibling comment says that "Du" (second-person familiar) for business is becoming more common, and while that's true, I would NOT recommend using it without a good knowledge of German culture and your specific audience.


I'm not sure about older people, but business/formal emails in Japanese are like at least 70% fluff. There are loads of guides on the internet like [1], just look at the English translation of the example at the top...

Depending on the level of formality you might need to conjugate verbs slightly differently or use vocabulary that's considered more respectful. From my experience the younger generation is more relaxed about the rules, but Japan as a whole is pretty slow to change.

[1] https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/how-to-write-ema...


But this is the issue. There is not one way to do it right.

My ideal message from my telco would be this one line:

"Hi Leo, your monthly bill for <phone number> is available. Get it here: <url>"


going further i have a strong preference not to be named at all in an email from my phone company. let's keep it simple; if i want the email at all then i want to go right to the bill URL, in your example


I'd say it depends on the area and the type of business. In Lower Bavaria it's quite common to use informal language even with strangers. Any mechanic, plumber or other craftsmen will use "Du" the moment they see you. Formal language is usually used in a more formal environment, like banks or maybe some fancy restaurant or fancy shop.


I speak both german and french, and I don't like being addressed with "Du" or "Tu", be it in letters, email or whatever. It is for me a lack of respect.

In France the etiquette requires that you ask permission to use "Tu", and there are people who refuse you the right (it basically signals that they see you as a servant).


You would likely get a similar reaction in Japan by addressing letters to <given name> rather than <surname>, using plain style rather than polite style, and omitting keigo.


> It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

It’s not uncommon in the west either and it’s weird how much we ignored it in software e.g. “I’m John Q. Smith the Third but call me John” or “May I call you j-dog?”

> There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

There’s also the issue of honorifics which you usually can’t get from names alone, as well as titles (whether professional or nobility) which can be very important to people’s identity.


Web apps great equalizer. No one cares if you are knighted or have phd, put in your name and you can watch funny cats same way as the rest of pleb.


Imagine if the name on a tomb does not match the one that the person preferred to be called with, and everybody used all the times. I know one case but I don't know the reason.


Loved ones sometimes pay to have nicknames engraved on tombstones. I think those things are often left off unless the nickname had strong significance to the closest friends and family members of the deceased


Does your “Asia Pacific” presence include countries like India? As others have pointed out, it’s better to read that article “Falsehoods programmers believe about names” [1] and then figure out how you’d like to deal with it. Looking at “Family, Given” or “Given, Family” is shortsighted and may cover only a few east Asian countries.

In India there are patronymic names with initials, mononyms (no “family name” or initials), names with just a given name (one or multiple words) and no “family name”, names where the “last name” is a place, etc.

If you truly want to cater to all kinds, just have one field for name and another for what they’d like to be addressed as.

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...


Ohh boy, as someone who works on a travel booking, service serving customers in Asia, this problem hits hard. I guess the answer depends on how you plan to handle the names once they got submitted.

I happen to be handing that data over to airlines, which has some of the less forgiving, yet fragmented name requirements. If you handle this incorrectly, your customer can't fly, even after they paid for the flight. And for those who say that this doesn't matter as much: It absolutely does. People do get confused by this more frequently than you think. I've seen people losing an entire trip that they saved for, all because of unclear naming requirements.

The way I deal with this is to provide a country and locale specific name fields. You don't have to detect the geolocation or track the user for this, just let them choose whatever locale setting they want, and give them the "sensible" layout. Here are some examples:

- In Vietnam, we use last name then first name.

- In Indonesia, we use first name, then last name, but also give an option to declare that the person doesn't have a last name.

- In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

Even when you've handled the layout convention carefully, the 3rd party you're handing the data to, if one exists, might not give the same care and attention that you do. In my case: some airlines just haven't gotten around the idea that some people simply don't have last names. When a person with a single name wants to fly, airlines want the customer to use the name for both first and last name (e.g. If the person's name is David, then the airline expects "David David"). If you require First Name and Last Name as the input, and don't elaborate on how to fill them, the customer might simply fill the last name with a dot (".") character. The airlines / any other 3rd party won't accept that. For this, I suggest to detail out the ways in which you handle the data and go talk to your providers, if any.

All in all, it's a pretty tough challenge, and the wisdom around this isn't going to fit inside a single HN post. I do commend you for actually thinking about this problem. Good Luck.


> In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so on. Often I can’t even determine if they have my name correct in their records – it could be recorded correctly but used incorrectly, or it could be recorded incorrectly and used correctly. Sometimes I suspect it’s recorded incorrectly but also used incorrectly in a different way.

Normally it’s not a problem, but like you say, airline tickets can cause issues. I think I’ve been demoted from “check in online” to “check in at a counter because we need to check your paperwork” a bunch of times because my passport doesn’t match my name on my ticket. Often it’s not even the name order – the airline will only sell my ticket with a first name and last name field (meaning I have to drop my middle name, which is on my passport) or they ask for all three and then concatenate first and middle with no space and truncate the last few letters.

Everything would be so much easier if I could just enter my name.


It seems that with things like ticket there should be explicit "as in passport" instructions. Not that people will follow those...


Some people have more than one passport (multiple citizenship) and could use a different one to enter different countries because of visas. The name could be partly different on those passports. But yes, they probably know the passport they'll use since the time they buy the ticket.


I as an example have 2 passports, and my name is first middle1 middle2 last.

One of my passports has my name like that, the other is first middle1 last, so even between passports its not the same, as one of them drops one of my middle names.


I know people hate the idea of all three of world government, government IDs, and reducing people to numbers, but things would be a lot easier if we could just write on forms "I'm person number 15389247652" and let name matching be relegated to historical documents.


As you hinted, we would need a global authority recognized and trusted by everyone at least for name registration and resolution.

About government IDs and reducing people to numbers, most of the threads here are already giving them for granted. We are a number once we're in a database.


Why not just have a single field for "your name as it appears on your identity document"? Or do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale?

I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and middle mashed together, and middle lowercased). That of course doesn't match my ID, but I've never had a problem traveling, even when I sometimes leave out my middle name entirely. (I guess I get less scrutiny most places since I'm an American white male.)


> do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale

Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...


There may be multiple identity documents with different names. This particularly happens a lot when the name itself is not written in Latin script and has to be romanized---one of my credit card had a different romanization (that I couldn't control) compared to what was written to my passport (that I had a control). Of course it is also possible that there is no canonical romanization available in any of those documents as well.


Airlines are always weird. I remember myself consistently being FIRST/LASTMR on tickets; all caps, no space, with a slash, no comma. I suppose it's some canonical encoding that everyone working in commercial aviation just knows.


That reminds of an issue with a passenger whose given name ends in the letters "MR".

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850


I wonder if you could circumvent some of this with the default first/given & last/family name with two checkboxes to choose the preferred name to be called with. Of course it wouldn't be bullet-proof if you wanted to substring the name, like using only the 2nd part in Vietnamese names, and you probably would have to make filling both of them optional.

Or just having a preferred name and full name, duplicating data but probably it wouldn't be a big deal in most cases.

This would be a nice GitHub project for someone to showcase name inputs in all languages.


> In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

How do you handle this when passing the data to the airlines?


To be fair, if you only have one name, then it is both your first and your last name.


This is not just an Asian thing, Hungarians put their family name first (another reason not to call it a "last name").

Not to forget the special case that people may only have one name (for which some immigration offices had to invent the rule to repeat the single name twice, as first and last name, to comply with online and offline forms that have these often mandatory fields). So we may add two patterns to your pattern list:

  Only, Only
  Only
Localization is tricky, not just for names, e.g. postcodes (GB) and zip codes (US) come after the city ("London SW4 0AF", "Beverly Hill, CA 90210"), in many other places before (e.g. FR, DE, e.g. "91054 Erlangen").


I was recently in India. When using Zomato to order a food delivery, I was confused why the address form was asking for a PIN code. It took a moment to realize that PIN code was referring to what I think of as a zip/postal code.


Where did you visit in India? You liked it? :D


Jodhpur, Pune, and Agra (Red Fortress, Taj Mahal. I also went to Ellora Caves, which was amazing! India is great :)


Awesome! I hope you tried all the food items including desert delicacies cooked in sand and charcoal.


Personal opinion.

As an Asian person, don’t overthink this.

Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two.

Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity.

Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for something that might cause headaches later.


Don't do this.

In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong.

And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outside name (so that ghosts can't follow you home). Or you have your real name and an unofficial English name (for reasons both good & bad) that literally everyone at work calls you.

In the Philippines people have names Anna Katrina Gomez. But you don't call them Anna. You call them Katrina because that's how it often works in the Philippines.

The solution is simple:

One field is "what is your full name?"

One field is "what would you like to be called?"

You don't need to try to infer one from the other.


Interesting. Indeed, why not just ask “what would you like to be called?” and maybe for administrative(?) purposes ask the full name.

Naming is a tar pit and even Westerners might like to be called John when their name is Winstonshire. Let’s not even bother.

What is the downside? I’m not seeing it. I see people here recommending to implement logic to handle this fully and I’m not seeing why this would be preferable.


Heck, I just saw on Reddit some guy just discovered his girlfriend's "real name" is "Lawr'ryn" due to dumb parents. She preferred to go by Lauren. And her brother Pur'see went by Percy.

Why, as a system designer, would you force your user to see "Lawy'ryn" every day just because that's on some government document somewhere?


This is the most sensible answer here.

My name is Ritobrata Ghosh (Given Family). But my friends, teachers, colleagues always called me Rito. I have a different short name that is used by immediate family and close relatives.

Rito is also easier for western people's tongues. So, that is what I almost always use. I use my full name only in legal and financial documents. In every other place, I am just Rito. I like to be addressed as "Rito" and appear as "Rito Ghosh" in badges, documentation, slack, any non-legal/non-financial documents.

So, the best way to go, in my opinion, is having two fields- one for full name, another for preferred name. Do not _assume_ anything.

This is also consistent with western names, like: William Henry Gates III as Bill Gates.

There is also another field in many places where there are badges and such. "This field will appear as is in your badge" is wise in such cases.


Yes please! My wife and I constantly struggle with this kind of thing. When there's just a "name" field that permits some high number of characters, it's fine.

Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identification has both name orders, and both are correct.

Names are awful.


Not to mention you always have to second guess the designer.

Does "last name" mean "family name" even though it is my first name?

And what counts as "middle name"? Is it "Thi"? But my "first name" isn't Anh Mai. It is just Mai. But "Thi Anh" isn't my middle name, either, that's just nonsense.

And, yes, we have the "multiple documents with different name order" depending on whether it is the Vietnamese birth certificate, the US Consular Record of Birth Abroad, the Vietnamese passport, or the Australian passport....


No.

Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.

Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.


> In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."


Are you missing a name from your PH example perhaps?

Everyone I've known there has their mother's maiden name as a middle name, and father's last as last name. Then on marriage sliding the original last name to the middle name.

But one thing I did notice is that very few go by any given name, usually a play on it or a nickname instead.


And maybe you don't need the full name.

And don't limit it to Asia either, it's relevant everywhere.


Born in the Philippines, you forgot the middle name or mother’s last name is also important.


> You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.


> So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

As the app is apparently developed for use in Asia-Pacific, no, it isn't.


I guarantee that if someone vaguely familiar with the countries they operate in spends half an hour actually trying, they'll come up with heuristics that are correct for 95%+ of the target population.


So use the heuristics to set the initial value for the second field based on the first. Just let the user edit it as they wish.


That's exactly what I'm advocating!


I guarantee you half an hour is at least an order of magnitude too low of a time estimate to implement such heuristics.


You’re talking about literally billions of people, not “occasional edge cases”.


How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.


In way you are right.

From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. It's about 330 M people vs 8 billions, 4%, which is less than 10%.

But then you add the exceptional cases for every country or culture. From the other comments we already know that even in Western Europe there are many differences. So if you sum all those exceptional cases you get the 100% of the world population.

Edit: 330 M, typo was 353 M.


> From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family.

That’s not really “American”. Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same. Maybe it should be called “Anglophone” not “American”? To a certain extent, even “West European”

There are some subtle differences - my impression is the US is more accepting of generational suffixes (Jr, III, etc) than Australia is, for instance. But the overall structure “Given [Middle…] Surname” is shared


Is it really true that most Anglophone countries are the same? Is that how they do it in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, and Fiji?

There are a lot more Anglophone countries than just the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.


I think we should distinguish between (1) traditional English naming practices, and Anglophone countries which have inherited those from England, and (2) countries with a majority non-European cultural background which have adopted the English language, but some or many of whose naming practices derive from that non-European cultural background. When I said "Anglophone", I was really talking about (1) not (2). Maybe I should have said "Anglosphere". But, I don't actually know to what extent majority non-European Anglophone countries ("Anglophone but not Anglosphere") take their naming practices from England vs from their non-European culture(s); quite possibly, for some of them, much of their naming practices are derived from English/British culture not their non-European culture(s), and hence in terms of "First Middle Last" may be indistinguishable from (1).


> Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same.

I don't have any French or German or Polish friends to verify but this is so demonstably false just by reading some of comments here. Name Middle Family is clearly at most American.


> Name Middle Family is clearly at most American.

It isn't "at most American" because UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand also mostly use "Name Middle Family", just like the US does. There are still some differences in their naming practices, but those differences generally relate to subtler issues, not the big picture issue of name order.


France, Germany and Poland would not normally be considered Anglophone.


They aren’t exceptional names, that’s my whole point. They are just unfamiliar to you.


I don't know what you imagine I'm unfamiliar with (and you're probably wrong, but never mind that), but familiar or not, it's quite easy to handle the unexceptional cases, almost by definition.


It's not implausible if you consider that you're taking a rule that usually but not always works in the US and try to apply it to the whole world.


...yes? Have you looked at Indian names? Or Indonesian names? Or Ethiopian names


Yes. The vast majority of them follow a small number of simple patterns, and it's really not that hard to find a heuristic that interprets them with high accuracy.


The prime minister of Ethiopia is Abiy Ahmed. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was referred to as Mr Abiy, which is his given name. Ahmed is his father's name, and it would be incorrect to refer to him as Mr Ahmed. Likewise, many Tamil people often have a first name and a patronymic, which may just be referred to with an initial. Example: S. Ramanujan. Ramanujan is his given name, Srinivasa is his father's name. In Indonesia, the government doesn't have a notion of first and last names. If you have a surname it's interpreted by the government as your family having a tradition of adding the family name to the end (or beginning) of your name. Similarly in India you can have surnames, clan names, caste names, patronymics, or mononyms. Trying to divide a name up into its parts is a fool's errand: Much easier to simply ask, what is your full name and what is your preferred name.


What everyone is saying is that you do less work, use 0 heuristics and guess absolutely nothing, to get 100% accuracy.


100% accuracy but a substantially worse UX for the overwhelming majority of users. A heuristic doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.


You say the heuristic is simple. Would you mind writing out the heuristic you have in mind for deriving "name you'd want to be called" from "official name for administrative purposes"/"full name"?


Eh, the "don't overthink it" is how all tech has become western centric, especially US-centric. In the grand scheme of things it's a small annoyance, but having your culture or norms constantly overwritten by some tech-bros is bad.

Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.


Yes assume I have a Family name field and a Given Name field, the question is how to display them in the right order.

Im considering having a select field next to the name something like

Name Order: "Western style", "Eastern style"

or

Name Order: "Given Name, Family Name", "Family name, Given Name"

With a bit of extra work I can detect the country set a default for this field, while allowing users in places like Pakistan to still get the display order they want.

But I've never seen it done this way before, hence my curiosity to ask everyone.


Country isn’t adequate; different parts of India use different conventions. To list the two states I’m most familiar with: West Bengal is mostly “Given Family” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_name>, while Telangana largely uses “F. Given” (family name normally abbreviated, in my experience; the initial can also be more than one Latin letter for some Telugu consonants, mostly “Ch.”, and can be initials for more than one word) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_names>.

Seriously, just avoid splitting name fields if you can help it. Do you absolutely have to have split names? Begrudgingly do so and acknowledge things will never be right for everyone. But if not, just don’t (and don’t make the mistake of assuming a format in order to do things like surname sorting—with a unified field you simply can’t do surname sorting).


Minor thing, don’t call it “Western style” or “Eastern style”. I’m not sure what the correct term is.

There are plenty of Asian countries that don’t follow last name - first name so it’s not necessarily an “eastern” thing.

another opinion from me about automating based on country. It’s a cool thing to implement but might not be worth the effort.

An example I have is in the Philippines, majority of people go First Name Last Name. However, there’s a Chinese sub population that has last name first name. But then most of this sub population also have “Christian” names that they use in Most official documents or websites. I’m pretty sure other countries will also have similar nuances.

Maybe a screen name or username will be the razor.


As others have mentioned, this is impossible to get right -- for the simple reason that there is no consistent order -- not for the same country, the same geographic area, the same culture, or any other marker you can possibly think of.

Example: in Malaysia and Singapore, Chinese people can have traditional Chinese names -- SAA for surname and 2 characters that's their "given name" so to speak. Some have an English name -- but it's written ESAA. Some only have one character names, so it's ESA. Some surnames have 2 characters, so ESSA/ESSAA.

When filling out US forms, ESAA usually turns into Englishname Surname, and SAA turns into Givenname Surname. So the display order for the first is firstlast, but the second is lastfirst. Same country, same culture, different display order depending on whether their parents gave them English names or they chose one later in life.

When there's a middle name field, often ESAA names turns into E AA S - first middle last. This display order is wrong. It should be first last middle.

As you can see, even within the same country, same culture, same neighbourhood, you still don't have a consistent order. It's simply not possible to do this in a consistent way.


What have you seen as best examples of interfaces that support your local context.

Anyone ideas beyond throw everything together in one long field.

Part of what’s lost with this approach is you then don’t really know which part is which. Aka loss of semantic clarity.


Well, if the app is designed for the asia pacific region then last name first name should be default to fit the majority of user's expectation, no?


This is lumping Asia Pacific into one big group. For example in the Philippines, its first name - last name that’s the standard. And then there’s a minority of Chinese-Filipinos that sometimes have traditional Chinese names.

It’s more complex than what it seems that I think a razor would work rather than going through all cases.


Even in countries where you might assume this is true, it's not always!

For instance in China, most names are single character family name followed by a two character given name. Some rare family names are two characters and usually they will have a single character given name. Some people have single character family name and single character given name.

Then you get people from different ethnic groups who put the family name at the end. Often these are characterised by a long given name and then an interpunct joining that with the family name, but that's not always done. For instance a popular singer at the moment has the Chinese name 希林娜依·高 where 高 is a fairly normal Chinese surname so it's easy to identify as such. A very popular actress is named 迪丽热巴·迪力木拉提 so it's not always the case you can easily tell which name is which.

Even for those with simple construction, so the characters are FAB (family name, and 2 characters for given name). You'll find that within a family, where you might expect pet names, it's common instead to call each other by AB, except when they're annoyed and use the full name FAB. In a business context, someone with a higher rank might be F先生 (Mr F), F总 (Manager F), F董 (Director F), but close colleagues might call you AA, BB, 小A, 小B etc - but typically they won't get to choose that, they'll be told by the person "you can call me ___" and they might allow different people to use different names or react with their official title if someone uses too informal a name with them.

I've got Chinese friends who exclusively use an English name at work in China. I've got a friend who later moved to the UK, and most people in the UK know her by her Chinese name, but except for a few close school friends, nobody in her working life in China even knew her real name because the company she worked for only used English names (this isn't very common though).

In other countries, many people don't use their first name much. In the UK, I've known quite a few people who've primarily used their middle name, and others (including me) are generally known by others with a name that isn't among any of their given names. Sometimes these are common transformations, e.g. David to Dave, David to Dai (in Wales), but other times people just use initials or nicknames (e.g. I've got a friend who pretty everybody calls Danger, it started as a joke with friends, but now even his parents sometimes use it!)

Anyway, that was a long diversion, but it's always safer I think to ask for the full name as one field that not try to change it, but use it exactly as provided for official purposes, and to also ask for a preferred name for your communication with them. In cases were you share the name to other people, e.g. an online community, you might want an additional display name which might well be different again.


It doesn’t matter if your friend uses an English name at work.

It doesn’t matter if the ethnic group writes it last first or first last.

If you’re filling in Chinese documentation and writing it in Chinese it will be a single field in Chinese.

If you’re writing it in English it will be written in 2 fields as first name and last name as the English version of the Chinese name.

The spoken English name of “alice” or “David” are not used on official documentation.

Name cards will sometimes have English names and sometimes they will put the English name with Chinese last name. But also write the Chinese name in Chinese.

I can’t believe how much people are over thinking this stuff.


Sounds like you're overthinking. One field for "full name" and another for "how you want to be addressed" is way simpler than the "rules" you list above. And also consider that you've only listed rule for two cases (and your rules are wrong, or at best incomplete), and have left out the hundreds of other rules for other languages and cultures.


There is no list.

Either you live in China and fill in your name in Chinese.

Or you don’t live in China and you write your name in English.


Hong Kong is in China and everyone has an English legal name and most people have a Chinese legal name. The English name may be a Romanisation of the Chinese name, a western name or a combination. Depending on which combination of names you have, your nationality and the specific situation, the Chinese or English one may take precedence e.g some government departments prefer the Chinese name but most businesses prefer the English names unless it's a Mainland Chinese business.


Yes. Doesn’t change anything. You fill in stuff for mainland. You use Chinese name. You fill in stuff for Hong Kong. It’s either in English or Chinese. But it’s slowly transitioning to Chinese only. As China eradicates all the English stuff and implements the red scarf Education in HK.


Wait, Chinese application forms don't have two separate fields!? That adds to the list of falsehoods. Japanese ones always has one for surname, one for given, lines above for pronunciation always, except for signatures.


All forms require name + id.


Could you just have a single field for name and allow anything in that field? The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails, but the upside is that it basically handles any name or name order, e.g. Indonesian single names, Spanish names with the mother's surname included, etc.


> The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails

Which might be an upside, because there are cultures and contexts where it’s incredibly rude. You’re a glorified ledger, not a family member or life-long friend.


And in others the formality feels off and a tell-tale sign that the sender is not from here.

I get a lot of mail from foreign readers. Indians and Pakistanis are pretty formal, and most Africans even more so. On the other hand, some people from those same countries will write stream of consciousness emails that look like a text message to their dad.

The Western countries are a lot less formal, but and frequently drop the polite form which I was raised to use with all strangers.


Re: hi {first name}, I’ve had pretty good luck with a name field and then a “nickname” field that explicitly asks, “how would you like us to greet you?”


That's probably a good way to deal with interface issue, but do you really need their family names? It is a perhaps a good time to look at which data is needed vs what data collection from users is normalized


Related: as a Swede, the first times I had to fill out a honorific, it felt very weird. And many times they are required. We don't use honorifics in Sweden. The only difference between formal and informal address, is pretty much whether you use a nickname or not. The idea that there is a single category of "western name" is wonky.

Another is that my spoken/given name is after my "middle" name. Especially American forms don't deal well with that. In Sweden, you usually underline the given name, since it's used to address the person. Now I see a comment here saying that's a thing in the Philippines. That's interesting.


You used honorifics in Sweden too until fairly recently. Don't need to go further back than Pippi Longstockings (Herr Nilsson, Fröken Prysselius). And in genealogy I see plenty of Magisters, Profosses, Dragoons etc.

But Swedish naming traditions are great evidence that there's no such clean divide between "western" and "eastern" naming schemes: There have actually been dialects/areas where they put the genitive form if the family/farm name first, e.g "Dals Olof" even in Swedish, and in Finnish-speaking areas this was very common.


I find that while public Swedish records always store my full name, the "underlining" has often been lost. Many times I have been addressed by nurses or civil servants who assumed that my first given name was my spoken name.


I'm reminded of this blog post: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names ( https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... )

Good luck designing your system! Sorry I don't have any advice.


You have two fields: full name and the name you want to be addressed by (e.g. in an email). This should cover the requirements of 99% of apps. You can add another field if really needed.


If a message is automatically generated I'd rather it address me as "Dear Customer" or whatever. In general, perhaps it's better to have something nicely written in the manner of a circular than a badly faked personal message which is likely to impress as less human than the honest and straightforward approach.

Spammers and big corporations write "Dear John, Did you know ..."; your local sports club doesn't do that crap.


> the name you want to be addressed by (e.g. in an email)

In fact, I don't want my full name to be addressed anywhere at all. Just call me by the alias I provided.


The full name is typically used for billing, or just for record keeping. Your SaaS itself may not need it.


Substitute "full name" with "legal name". Then it's the government's problem.

Of course if you don't need the legal name it's best not to ask for it.


Won’t cover all finance apps - your name will most likely need to be submitted for sanctions screening, credit check, KYC checks etc. where understanding first name and last name is very important for cross-checking against other lists which expect the same.


Even in England, you would have to consider King Charles III's name. His given names are Charles Philip Arthur George. No family name. Of course, now his name is even a bit longer: "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". So, if you think he might sign up for your app, make sure your name field is long enough, and that the "Preferred Name" field can accommodate a space: "Charles III" or "Charles Rex"


He's from the house of Windsor so wouldn't he use that as his last name where it's needed?


No. It's not his last name. It's not even in his name anywhere.

Edit: Technically, his family name is Mountbatten-Windsor. Still not a last name, though.


What do you need their name for?

Do you need their legal name? As in, actually legally need it?

Realise that you'll probably need several name fields in different places depending on what you're doing, i.e. an e-commerce app may have a name to address someone by, a name on a billing address, a name on a shipping address, a name on a payment method... all of which can vary for the same person.

If all you need is a way to address them, just a single name field.


Seems more of a stackoverflow question?

But:

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans#...

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-enum.html

I'd have multiple classes handling each one a use-case, and a enum on user's record in order to specify which class to use for each, so that you can compute it from the nationality, but you could also potentially give each user the chance to set it for themselves


Is it really worth using enum in postgres over a plain string, and optionally a check constraint if you're super concerned about strictness?


Probably you're right, a simple string would work well enough


Don't even need to go as far as Asia, even european-descended cultures have different naming conventions.

Here in Brazil, it is very common to have "compound names" which are just... two given names you have to use together, for example "Ana Maria", AND it is also common to have "middle names" which are neither family names, nor given. My name, for example, is Leonardo Giovanni Scur, but "Leonardo" is my given name that I respond and expect people to call me by, and "Scur" is the family name. "Giovanni" only exists in documents, basically.

So, the first question is, what are you using their names for? If you are a paid service that identifies users to other users by name, ask for a "billing name" for your legal/policy needs, and a "display name" for identification, don't attribute any structure to it. If you don't need a legally identifying name, just ask for the "display name", and let people name themselves "Sir Bearington of Nunya Biznis".


Tangent:

A common reasoning for asking for a structured name is to build visually consistent interfaces, such as identifying everyone by their given name.

But that is disrespectful to people with "complicated" names, as well as social conventions. Some people would rather be called by their family name, others their given name, and I guarantee you none of them says "but think about the pretty, homogenous UI we will be leaving behind!".

For users, your brand aesthetics are at best very far down on their list of things to care about, even lower than thinking about what specific dish they will make for lunch in 3 weeks.


So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a greeting/displayname if we need to do "Hello $customer" in an email.

But still. There are often hard requirements that are impossible to reconcile with the "just store one name" idea. As an example: you need to produce alphabetically sorted lists. It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example. So as an example if you really do need to have BOTH "Doe, John" and "John Doe" what do you do in case you know at least 99% of users will have names following this format? Do you force people to enter their name twice? In that situation I would:

- Store it as a single name column, with more columns as required (greeting, sortable, ).

- Present a UX that is appropriate for the region of 99% users. So for western Europe show a "first name", "last name", but don't store that: just set the name column to "$firstname $lastname" and the index name column to "$lastname, $firstname" and greeting to "$firstname" for example. That way I at least let 99% of your users only input the name once.

- But (and this is important) offer an alternative way of specifying it for those who don't have a name that conforms to the format. You let just that small fraction of users enter a name/indexname/greeting instead.

And yes: the above ONLY applies if it's really a hard requirement to separate them, because the last name sorting was really a requirement. Of course there are other requirements that force other solutions. The "just one input" is the correct solution for all the cases where it is possible.


Even sorting alphabetically sorted lists by last name differ in western cultures, in the case of particles in the last names.

Some countries file “de Rohan”, “von Ruhr”, “van Rotterdam” and similar under “R”, others just under the first character of the string.


How does that work in countries where it is common (like in the Netherlands)? I imagine software handles it by pattern matching as when sorting artists as “Beatles, The”? To just match some known “de”, “van” or “van der”!

Anywhere I know van der Whatever would just be sorted on “v” but that only works because almost no one has such a last name.


Presenting an alphabetically sorted list only really makes sense if you can force everyone to use a single alphabet.


Yes. What I’m talking about is of course a system where 100% use the same alphabet and 99.99% the same name format.


> It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example.

Luckily, it has become a bit uncommon to manually search a printed document by name.

In times of GDPR, the days of printed lists of personal info posted on some bulletin board are pretty much over. For a list that is non-public, chances are you already have it on a device with a search feature.


Use a single text field for the full name.


This. I'd also add "How would you like to be called" as sometimes people go by their second given name, not the first given name. For example, you might have a common first name like Muhammad or Ketut.


Yes. Unless you have a really good reason to split the name (legal documents), you should think really hard about why you're attempting to get a full name in the first place, instead of "a nickname for this account". And if you really do want the name, why can't you use whatever the user puts in a single field "name" instead.


I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude (I personally find it rude too, e.g. "Hey John R. Brown, this is your order"), so it's useful to split up "given name" and "family name" into 2 fields so that you don't have to depend on name ordering which varies by culture.

If they only have one name, like many people in Myanmar, then it's just the given name. If they don't have family names (some cultures use patronymics) then it's just a long given name. If they have double-barreled last names like Hispanic names, then it's just a long family name.

Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.


> I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname.

> Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude

Stuffy, Maybe, but rude? Calling people by their first name is rude. Calling people by forms of address which don’t exist is rude.


> Stuffy, Maybe, but rude?

Full names, at least in the USA, are sometimes used by parents to address their children when they are in trouble. Rude might not be the right word but potentially at least jarring. I have never experienced it or seen someone react that way from text but I have with verbal addresses.

edit some conversations about the topic for reference since it is harder to google for than I initially thought it would be.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-parents-address-their-unruly-ch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskParents/comments/pj6aqw/why_do_y...


> Stuffy, Maybe, but rude? Calling people by their first name is rude. Calling people by forms of address which don’t exist is rude.

For me and my people, it's perceived as rude (it sounds infantilizing). Just because you don't perceive it that way doesn't mean it is not.

> Calling people by their first name is rude

Yes, it can be. That's why it's useful to have their last names disambiguated so a proper title can be appended. When you have the full name in a single string, you can't do that -- you don't have enough information to decompose the name into its parts. When you have both given name and family names, you don't have to guess which is which.

There are forms of address that sound rude if appended to full names.

(of course it can be argued that even with 2 fields one might get it wrong, so I fully agree that adding a field indicating how one prefers to be addressed is the best solution of all)


> For me and my people, it's perceived as rude (it sounds infantilizing). Just because you don't perceive it that way doesn't mean it is not.

So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t know whether the user’s culture favours given names, family names, full names, or even none of the above.

And that’s before getting into honorifics and titles.


> So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t know whether the user’s culture favours given names, family names, full names, or even none of the above.

No, that is not it.


> No, that is not it.

Yes, it very much is. You’re declaring that one form of address is rude to your culture, while acknowledging that it is proper to an other culture.

This means the two cultures are completely incompatible on that point, and thus no generic munging method can satisfy both.

And yet your original suggestion was to do exactly that, just in a form suited or at least compatible with your cultural sensibilities.


No that is not right at all. I won’t continue.


> For me and my people, it's perceived as rude

Are you or your people Asian?

Though, even in Asia which names to call a person can differ wildly. I'm not sure how your personal ideas about rudeness are relevant here.


> Are you or your people Asian?

Yes.

> I'm not sure how your personal ideas about rudeness are relevant here.

Names matter.


> Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname.

For westerners you might want sunny, good-news messages to say "Hi John" but for an apology for a problem (like a delay or cancellation) you might want to use the more respectful "Dear Mr Doe"

On the other hand, this discussion has plenty of examples of why separate 'first name' and 'last name' fields don't work in all cultures. And I think we can all agree that asking people for a name and two desired forms of address ready to e-mail them in two different tones would be a very unusual sign up process.

I'm not sure there's any universal, fully respectful way of doing this across cultures.


> Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.

I'm just French (where we often use "FAMILY Given" in a formal setting, but "Given Family" is common otherwise) and I still need a moment to think every time I see "first name" "last name" fields instead of "family name" "given name", after decades of being online.

My parents just fill these forms in random order, basically.

The other problem is:

> For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

This often doesn't translate well between cultures. American websites will often use the given name in any setting and this is weird. If they want to be friendly-informal they should address me with "Hello Given Family, this is your order".


> For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

It is really curious to hear that your decide to disrespect huge populations because you worry about respect.

> Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.

Sure. People will mange. It is still communicating that the developers' head is stuck in their own context.

Will we manage? Sure. Is it respectful? Not at all.


And make it a rather long text field. And make it accept pretty much any character. But watch out for Little Bobby Tables. (https://xkcd.com/327/)

Names are HARD.


Is there any reason why you need to specifically know the first and last name, or the family and given name? I think there is a lot of inertia in the idea that you must have two name fields, but why?

Why not just have one name field, and let people type what they want in it?

Or better yet, have one field for “what should I print as the name when I send you a package or letter”, and “what would you like me to call you?” (e.g. preferred name)


Also even in west the first name + last name doesn't capture the whole effect.

For example my credit card has last name, first name and middle name. And should probably be passed as such. In some addressing you want all three. But for most communication and even mailing things only first + last is enough or if more formal last + first.

In the end it is huge mess with no clearly applicable rules.


Shameless plug: I gave a talk on names and the problems that arise when you give them special treatment - https://youtu.be/NfKhY3sAQ9E

But the tl;dw is to do this: <input type="text" name="name" />

I don't know what kind of app you're building, but unless it's 100% impossible (from a business perspective) not to separate people's names into multiple fields, you really should just make it one field.

If it's a true requirement for the business—due to a third-party vendor's requirements, for example—then I suppose you could simply ask the user which order they prefer and display their name accordingly.


Indonesia: Single name is common. Therefore only one field filled in should be legal.


It's half funny and sad that for passports one has to repeat their names for both fields or not fill the second field at all (which may be not allowed) or have to make up new name.


Yes. and for things like KYC/AML the 100 points test can get very literal about "as written on the passport"


Not necessary Asian btw. As a Russian I can tell that Russians also may use "family name - given name - father name", usually in official documents.

Though it it also may be just "given - family", as well as any other variation informally. So you wouldn't make a mistake with UI


Doesn't Russian also have different forms of names depending on their grammatical place in the sentence?


You only need to capture the name in nominative case, though; declined forms are derivable from that.


IMHO as a Japanese, the western convention is preferable if the app is English. It's less confusing.

At least it should be consistent across the app.


I built an ecommerce system where we shipped hundreds of thousands of tshirts to people. They used a bazillion variations of browsers. It took a while for us to get the form 100% correct across everything.

One field.

Also, don't use type=number fields... the browser UX is terrible across many devices. Just make everything type=text and be done with it.


I have nothing useful to add except that I know quite a few people who would be happy if they could have an apostrophe in their name without everything going to shit


Try logging into Facebook with different locale settings on your Facebook account. You can have several names depending on your language. That way they can handle name order but also show English speaking contacts a readable name, while say, Japanese friends gets to see the Japanese name.


It's not only and ansian thing. In France thr convention is LASTNAME Firstname (with that casing)


I was going to say that. It’s amazing how often French users get it wrong when filling in forms. It can result in online services trying a more informal tone calling people by their last name only (“Salut, DUPONT!”), which can be seen as a bit rude. People don’t read form labels with great attention.


Funny in some cultures calling people by their last name is actually respectful.


It is respectful in France too, but only if you use a title. Say the person is DUPONT Maëlle, then:

"Bonjour madame Dupont" is respectful

"Bonjour Maëlle" is informal

"Bonjour Dupont" is rude.

"Bonjour Maëlle Dupont" or "Bonjour DUPONT Maëlle", using whatever the user put as their "name", is just neutral (though the former is less formal than the latter).

Generally, you only want to address young people by their given name, and adults are more likely to find being addressed by their given name rude, than young people are to find being addressed by their family name "weird" (unless they are maybe less than 16).

I find that using just the given name in any kind of official communication often has a "fellow kids" vibe.


It's worth noting that this convention is also applicable in Francophone African countries, but not in Quebec.


In my opinion, name should always be a two field setup. One would be the full name for legal documentation. This can be tokenized for searching databases. The other would be the preferred name of address "You may call me Jim" which shows up on "Welcome Jim!" messages. Trying to parse out names is almost pointless. There are so many different name standards it's bonkers. If you want you could even include a phonetic section for pronunciation.

If you need to split first, middle and last name for US government form entry you can just ask for those when you need them individually.


Another case you might want to accommodate is Arabic speaking countries where the names goes like name son-of father-name son-of grandfather-name son-of great-grandfather-name tribe name. In most cases, such as when dealing with government applications four generations is required but sometimes tribe name is omitted where it can identify your religion, sect to prevent bias to you or against you. The son-of (Bin or Ibin) is mostly omitted except for cases where the first name is composite of two names, like “Mohammed Ali”, where both parts are valid names on their own.


The name order isn't your only issue to worry about. A Japanese system might be expected to have two fields, one for the name as it's written and another for pronounciation. Just in case someone decides that 小鳥遊 as a name is pronounced as たかなし.

I remember Amazon.co.jp having two name fields when you registered a new user, and in English they were called "Your name" and "Your name again", because a name pronounciation field probably makes little sense as a concept to most non-Japanese speakers.


Well there are some kanji names that have multiple pronunciations (with only one being correct for an individual). And some Chinese people in Japan go by the Japanese pronunciation of their hanzi/kanji name.

They way these fields are done in Japan is often difficult if you have a non-Japanese name and give a lot of insight to this discussion. I've encountered many variations of these two sets of fields. Usually the name fields accept kanji, hiragana and katakana, sometimes accept roman letters, but sometimes if the site can be set to english, only then name fields may or must be entered in roman letters. Usually the pronunciation fields must be in katakana, but sometimes they must be hiragana and again sometimes if the site can be set to english, it may or must be entered in roman letters.

Sometimes, like for a credit card application, there is a third set of fields for romanization. And for names, romanization has standard rules but there are exceptions such as when your family has been using a previous romanization so you shouldn't automate it, especially if an exact match to a passport or credit card name is required. Many other languages have different romanization possibilities for names too. There are even cases where bank insists on one romanization and the passport office insists on another leading to airplane tickets issued with the wrong one!

Some (mostly old) systems require so-called full-width roman characters (same width as a Japanese character and monospace) and some systems require so-called half-width katakana. The latter usually doesn't accept small katakana or diacritical marks, making it difficult to read and write non-Japanese names (or company names for that matter). Back in the day to transfer money at a bank you had to successfully write the recipient's name this way but these days all banks can automatically grab the katakana name and you just have to check it (but it's still in hard to read half-width katakana).

A common annoyance is when everything must be in full-width characters except phone number which must not be.

Finally, there is one type of field that really can trip you up: the address field. It usually must be in full-width characters which is fine in principle, but building names are often (officially, on the record) in English. The windows Japanese IME will happily default to "normal" and not full-width characters. This is easy to spot for a building name and figure out your mistake. But if you live on the third floor (denoted by adding "－３Ｆ") it's hard to spot an accidental "-3F", "－3Ｆ", "－３F" or especially "-３Ｆ" (the dash is wrong).


Fun fact: some cultures only have one name, i.e. no first or last name.


After reading that document and the comment section, it seems that the really distinct name variants are:

1. Full legal name (as it appears in a passport, e.g. William Robert Smith)

2. Full formal name (this is how you want to be addressed and/or referred in a formal context, e.g. Dr. Professor William R. Smith, MP".

3. Abbreviated formal name (e.g. W. R. Smith)

4. Informal name (how you want to be referred/addressed in less formal context, e.g. Bill Smith)

5. Highly informal name (how you want to be addressed in close circles, e.g. Bill)

6. Nickname (e.g. Chuck)

It seems that (more or less European) convention of having first name(s) and a last/family seems have this goal: being able to store just one variant and to generate other variants (except the nickname) according to fixed rules, in other words, automatically.

Of course you should ask a user only of what you need. So if the only reason you ask for a name is to be able to address them in messages, you should ask "how you would like me to call you?" or something like this.

You can give users an option to, say a check box, to indicate their names follow the "European" convention, and then give them the fields that allow to auto-generate name variants, allowing them to override if necessary.

Just my 2 cents :-)


20+ years in Asia here. Have run many sites/apps and filled in many forms. Here is what you do:

Full name field. (Optional) Title field. (Optional) Display name preference. (Super optional) Allow the user to duplicate ALL of these fields for EACH IANA/ISO language, eg. many people may have a Chinese or Thai name and also a separate English name with zero relation.

Read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... and note there is an unwritten set of similar fallacies regarding signatures, plus an addresses version at https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...


If it is just for e-commerce, just steal signup form from local e-commerce websites. Or if there are local competitor platforms that does as good as yours, look into theirs.

But the question sounds like there are already substantial asian users in divergent conventions without frictions. If that is what your app is trying to fix, I'm not completely sure how it will work out.


You say Asian, but same order in Hungary too.

Funny part, now living in Taiwan, when the forms ask me for my "English Name", I never know it means "First Last" (which would be the opposite order for me of the original form), or merely "Name in Latin characters".

Names are hard.


Not suggesting it for the UX, more of a curiosity: in France, a somewhat common convention is to put the family name in uppercase. This is well known by everyone, but not everyone does that. Sometimes you would receive an email from "Robert Martin" and stop for a second to figure it out.


Don't over think it. Either:

- Label the fields FAMILY, GIVEN, MIDDLE (then put them in the order you desire) - Or simply put NAME

For a LOT of use cases, FULL NAME side-steps the issue and works out great. Sure your emails that go out are "Hi {{ full_name }}," but that's okay.


I come from a family that traditionally writes names as Familyname Givenname.

But even in our country Firstname Lastname is prevalent among many regions and central government.

I grew up in the 90s and simply resigned that I will always be Givenname Familyname in most systems and documents.

After school I never bothered writing / typing / filling my Familyname first anywhere.

By simply staying consistent with this (wrong) way, I ensured that all my documents perfectly agree with each other. That peace of mind and lack of hassle is worth any "sacrifice" for me. Others may place different value on keeping their conventional names and must also have real reasons to do so too. I was lucky maybe, not to have those hurdles.


In the Android apps I've worked on, family name and given name are saved separately in the database and then in our string file we have a separately defined string "full name format" that just takes in two strings. Depending on the localization string file, the two strings can be reversed. Haven't had to do major internationalization efforts in many apps I've worked on but this has been perfectly fine for times we needed to have multiple formats.

Just considering other countries and languages (and not doing obviously American/English only) has made the effort considerably easier, even when other countries aren't in the radar at the time


Here's CLDR work on that: https://cldr.unicode.org/translation/miscellaneous-person-na...


It depends on the purpose. Here you say it’s just so you can call them by their name properly, so just use a single text field “What name would you like us to address you as?”. If there’s legal or other issues that might not be good enough.


I was wondering when someone would cite this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

But since nobody else seems to have done so, I will. Globally, names don't follow any common format or concept at all that you can reduce to a formula. My takeaway is that it's best to have a free-format "full name" field, and another "preferred name" field so you can allow people to choose how to be referred to.


Honestly, most apps don't need a full name. Just a preferred name is enough.

If you really need a full name, it'll be because you need it for a specific institution, like government or bank. In that case, you probably need the ability to provide a separate full name for each institution.


In Indonesia , we have name anarchy. Some people have a family name, some people have two given names, some people only have one name, some people have many names and none of them are family names...

How will your app handle people with a single name? My wife's mother splits her name in two based on syllables, but that's not exactly right.

I think two fields, one mandatory -- "name" -- and other optional -- "preferred name" -- is the way to go.

You should also consider how to handle people changing names, in the events of marriage, sex change, religious conversion, or what have you.


In English, if the names are separated by a comma it generally indicates that they're in surname, given names order.

I think this is to make sorting easier, since names are sorted in alphabetical order by surname then given names.


Could you put the surname with uppercase letters? That's a convention used in France that I think we should all use.

In Spain, where we have two surnames (first one from father and first one from mother in either order), that would make easier for foreigners to understand that our surname is not the last word. e.g. José Luis GARCÍA LÓPEZ means García López is his surname, while José Luis is a composed name (like JFK where John Fitzgerald were his two names).


Other things I've had to deal with: in Myanmar people usually don't have a concept of first and last name, just two (females) or three (males) words that form their "name" (as far as I can remember).

Also, often names in Sri Lanka look like this: Rajapaksha Mudiyanselage Siril Ariyaratna. Two family names and one or two given names. Regardless of the number of fields used, displaying long names like that needs some special considerations.


Wait until you see Icelandic names where there is no last name at all. Björk's "last name" is Guðmundsdóttir, because she is the daughter of Guðmundur, whose "last name" is Gunnarsson, because he is the son of...

The Indian name situation, going by initials instead, is particularly interesting. There is a famous professor I know who goes by initials because his second name is forty letters long.


There's an excellent GitHub repo that lists a lot of common falsehoods regarding names. I'm not sure how useful it'll be to OP, but the repo in general should probably have way more attention than it already does.

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit...


Another edge case: aside from different orderings in different countries, in Spanish speaking countries people have 2 surnames.


Representing names (and postal addressing via UPU S1) are one of the use cases where SGML/XML and other document techniques feels appropriate in internal business data representation, as opposed to storing details in 1NF (a la first/last name) in databases, especially when working with international customer data.


Don't some Asians use an alternate name too, a more Westernized version of their name, alongside their native name?


If you have an iOS app I suggest looking into https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/personn...


In Calibre (the ebook management software) there are two fields: "author name" and "author sort name", both free-form text. The latter serves as the sort key when the books are ordered by author. I have found this solution both elegant and practical.


As others have said, there's a lot to be said for having a single name field and not trying to second-guess how people expect this to be presented. There's huge variation here, and some cultures don't even have a concept of a single last/family name.


Store "names" as a JSON document per person, and provide different view functions that construct a "full name" string based on that data and localized standards/conventions. You have infinite flexibility with nominal (heh) overhead.


Common in europe as well. Just use a name input field and a display name or preferred name field.


ObRef: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...


Meanwhile Japanese company assuming everyone on this planet must have Kanji name with Katakana spelling, don't be mad at them when you can't fit your alphabet name into their scheme haha.


On the flip side, I wish rat Japanese design allowed for middle names. It annoys me that my marriage certificate has my first and middle name concatenated together simply because my legal name on my passport has a first, middle, and last name.


Do other countries have a concept of a “legal” name? Like someone said their names are a set that can be in any order or just pick one: does the government insist on a single specific order for interacting with them and with, eg banks?


I would call it “first” and “last” and, therefore, put “first” first.

(I’m very serious, I thought a lot about this because as a non-native speaker I often get confused with expressions like “given”, “surname”, etc. don’t make me think please)


And if -by chance- you have the power of change immigration forms, I will forever be grateful.


I would ask for a breakdown according cultural fields if there are interactions with external systems (e.g. payroll or banking, etc), but carry a single field preferred full name that is auto populated with a best guess suggestion.


There's an established pattern for this, which is to provide users with a choice of:

  Sort order:
    - By First Name
    - By Last Name

  Display order:
    - First, Last
    - Last, First
Obviously, users can input names in a multitude of ways. But the convention is to offer at least two distinct fields, "First name" and "Last name". The sort order determines if the items are ordered by first name or last name. And the display order determines if the full name for each item is displayed as First name and then or last name, or the other way around.

And finally, set a default based by the user's locale and region.


Alot of Variation is a new one. What's it look like?


I always thought “First” and “Last” relate to the order of the names and was compatible with cultures that have self family, family self etc….?


i work in ecommerce and we have a conditional for the order of the fields based on the delivery country the user checking out


if this is an iOS app use Apples PersonNameFormatter and let the user's device localisation decide

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/personn...


Have you looked at how the tech giants before you have solved this issue?


Seems many tech giants have taken a western colonial view and expect anyone different to just suck it up.


The tech giants often don't account for EU customs, let alone non-Western ones.

Instead I would look at how the relevant governments handle it, if they have something like the UK's component catalog.


I18n string interpolation


var names []string


One interesting approach would be to use a regex to detect if the name is written in Hanzi, Kanji or the Korean or Vietnamese alphabets and write the name in whatever format is appropriate for the locality. The Asian people I know would be be unsurprised to see their name rendered western style when written using whatever romanization format their native language uses.


You can't do this: what language do you think a name like 金正恩 belongs to, and how do you rule out the others? Given this, what parts do you expect to extract from it?


It's very simple: put a drop-down field on the web form which allows the user to select which naming convention they'd like to use (generally by country, but there can be more for other regions too). This should yield only a few hundred different options to scroll through. Then each option loads a different form specific to that option. Load the whole thing in one giant blob of JS and have it load for every page view.

I've seen lots of websites programmed exactly this way, so it's obviously good web design.


Sure, but that was a direct response to someone who said "just have a single field and run it through a regex to figure things outs".


Upvoted for the delightful use of sarcasm.


You mean well so I gave you an upvote :-). I'm a Westerner living in Asia. The name my British parents gave me is James Hush. Every family member calls me Jamie. My legal Chinese name is 許杰, if you tried to write that the "Western" way the closest thing you could do is write xǔ jié, but even then there's multiple Chinese characters that represent "xǔ" and "jié" so it would make no sense.

Names are hard hahahaha.


Please don't do this. Like with western names, it is impossible to discern nationality/culture from written names alone.




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