A friend of the family was half-Norwegian and half-Kiwi. He was born in Norway and his parents named him Bernt, a common Norwegian name.<p>When they moved to New Zealand, he quickly found that his name was pronounced "burnt", and after some time decided to change his name to Brent.<p>Many years later he moved back to Norway, and quickly realized "brent" is Norwegian for "burnt"...
This is actually a pretty interesting problem and the website doesn't do it full justice.<p>Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.<p>Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying.<p>Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be <i>extremely</i> short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.<p>There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
Nice idea but I question the correctness of the data. Looking at Arabic-English names, I see Damian, Daniel and Tobias! These are definitely not Arabic names, but there has been a recent trend among Arabs living in Europe to take on European names, but that pretty much extends to every other English name! It doesn’t mean these have now become valid Arabic names.
Now do trilingual, or arbitrarily multilingual.<p>We are Dutch and Polish, met in France, converse in (mostly) English, and worked in a few more, and now live somewhere with a dialect that only our oldest commands.<p>Double checking meaning and pronouncability involved at least four languages for us, and it wasnt easy, especially when you are nonnative!<p>In Europe, this is not that special, and in many other places neither. So many countries have people that speak a few natively.
Thanks for the laugh! It suggested using Elle as a Turkish-compatible English name for girls. It is the imperative for "grope".<p>I ought to contact them to add an English-compatible Turkish girls' name: Semen. (From Yasemin, or Jasmine.)
I would hold off on naming your son Adolph if you're going for a name that works in both English and Swedish... It's a name, sure, but it kind of fell out of fashion.<p>Statistics Sweden are publishing some statistics:<p>> 131 men have Adolf as a first name normally used<p>> The average age for the name Adolf is 74 years amongst men<p><a href="https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/namesearch/Search?nameSearchInput=Adolf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/n...</a>
As a Bilingual person, the biggest thing I care about is a name that is in my language/culture but is easily pronounceable by others who have never heard of that name. Nothing wrong if it is tough to pronounce of course but as an American Citizen (Indian Origin), my wife and I named our kids keeping that in mind and we have a 95% success rate :) where non Indians can still pronounce it correctly.
Don't get sidetracked by the call-to-action inputs, scroll down for what is, for me, the most interesting part!<p>(Feedback if the author is here: can't link to a section!)<p>In a div with the class top_names (there's no ID or a[name]), it shows the names that occur in most languages: Sara and Maria (21 languages) and Adam and Daniel (18 languages). There's also second and third places with 19, 18, and 17, 16 languages for female and male, respectively.<p>There's also this near the bottom, leftover testing or just seeing if anyone notices?<p><pre><code> <script>document.write("hello");</script>
</code></pre>
Edit: from the author's website "I used to run a subscription box called Candy Japan". Oh, it's that guy! To me this feels like an HN celebrity though I have no idea whether it's just me who remembers seeing that on HN. (I'm not actually interested in Japanese candy, for the record.)
Always worth remembering that there's no law that you have to use the same first name that's on your birth certificate. You can introduce yourself to people as whatever you want and people will call you that, they won't ask for ID.<p>So you might as well choose the official name name that the average bureaucrat in your jurisdiction is unlikely to misspell, and use other name(s) in different cultural or linguistic contexts.
It would be awesome if there was a mode in which the pronunciation of the names is also same in the two languages.<p>For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.
Why do we call them "baby names"; they're <i>given names</i>—a person will be using it their entire life—they just so happen to be chosen at birth.<p>Expecting parents and their inner circle are always discussing 'cute baby names,' forgetting in the arc of life their child will only [typo] be a baby a short time (fate willing and all that).<p>When I consider names, my standard is; "Would this sound solid and respectable if <the name> were the head of my division / a diplomat / leading thinker", etc.<p>If it doesn't feel like it'd be a fit for those "life roles," it's scratched.<p>(We only have one, a boy, and it met that standard but I still do that thought experiment on the premise if we'd had a girl.)
Ugh. English <-> Mandarin names are just a mess. Most of the suggestions can't even be expressed phonetically in Mandarin.<p>English <-> Russian is much better, but it misses the mark a lot. It also offers a lot of names that are too informal (e.g. Tanya is an informal variant of Tatiana).
It does not seem to work very well for Italian-French names.<p>I'm Italian and my partner is French and we searched for names that would be identical for Italian and French.<p>We did it manually and the trick is for each partner to look at names of the other language and write down the ones that are the same in theirs.<p>For example I'm Italian and so I read a list of French names and could easily spot the ones that are identical in Italian too.
Also my partner who is French red a list names in Italian and could easily spot the ones that are identical in French.
The dataset seems pretty unreliable. For example this page claims both that "Kai" isn't a name used in German: <a href="https://mixedname.com/name/kai" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mixedname.com/name/kai</a>. But then half of the "celebrities named Kai" are... German.<p>I wonder what the source for the names is. Kai is #289 in at least one list of the most popular names given to German kids in 2022: <a href="https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022</a>. So I'm surprised that it wouldn't show up in a list of >1000 "German" names.
I had a go at something like this when my kids were born. We were after names that could be pronounced in both Danish and Gujarati. After grabbing name lists from various websites, I generated phonetic translations of each name, and then looked at the names that had the shortest edit distances in the phonetic representation between both languages. It was a great exercise in taping bits of software together, and I ended up coming down to a shortlist of 7 names. I very proudly showed this list to my wife, and she showed me her list of names that she had written down.<p>Turns out two of the names were on both the lists, so we went with them. I have a feeling that it wasn’t so important that they were on my lists.
While this website seems great in theory, finding English-Hindi or English-Bangla names is a lost cause (especially masculine). I'm not sure how it "finds" the results but the names appear to be of either language and not "common" to both.
Being bilingual allows me to actually validate sites like this.<p>Almost all of the English ∩ Danish are completely wrong. "Alannah, Aleesha" etc.<p>Take this site with a spoonful of salt...
I tried it for English and Polish and the results seem quite mediocre. It gave me some names that are misspellings in Polish (like Carolina, Joanne, Veronica; those would typically be spelled Karolina, Joanna, Weronika, but bad parents can of course pick the wrong spellings). And some names don't feel very English to me.
My parents, who are not religious, gave all my siblings and me biblical names because they work in many countries and languages (not just western). Although, I wouldn't recommend Beelzebub.
He made this site because he wanted to find a Japanese-Finnish bilingual name… many Finnish surnames already sound vaguely Japanese (Raikkonnen, Suutari, Makinen, Harju)
We came across the same problem. We look for a male name that works for Male + Arabic + English + German and must not have special characters.<p>We chose Josef.
Interestingly the webpage doesn't show Josef. Most likely because they don't steming when doing the comparison
First suggestion I got for English/Japanese masculine names was “Hide”. That doesn’t strike me as a very common name in English. And the Japanese pronunciation (he-day) would constantly be mispronounced by English speakers who would read it like “hide”.
Hah, funny to see this here. When our daughters were born we were a French and German living in an English speaking country so we tried to make sure that the name works in 3 languages. Actually when we finally decided on a name for our first daughter (Tia) we chose a long form of the name (Tiahana) because my mother in law is half Spanish (Tia means Aunty in Spanish).<p>Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very uncommon names).<p>It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very different.
It says that <i>Vi</i> is a "feminine English name that may also be a Polish word".[1] Now, if <i>Emacs</i> were a masculine English name, it would be a perfect match for evil twins ;-)<p>[1] Hint: it isn't.
Is there something like the opposite of this, that allows you to find names that <i>don’t</i> have meanings in any other language? Specifically, names that don’t have rude or controversial meanings.
these results are absolutely hilarious for chinese, where names are almost entirely freeform, gender is determined by character choice (not sound), and there's only a limited set of suffixes to choose from in the first place.<p>i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo), but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the masculine chinese names show up with , or £ in them.
In practice, what happens in many cases is that you have a separate name for each place. For example, your English passport will say “John” but your Polish one will say “Jan.” The Polish one won’t actually let you have the name “John”, or at least it will be translated by default.<p>So it isn’t always necessary to have a single name that can translate into X languages, but that there is a version of the name in the languages you care about.
Giving your kid a name that cannot be pronounced in many other cultures is a great reminder to these cultures that there's something else in the world than <i>"insert culture which has trouble pronouncing that name"</i>.<p>I've got a family with "all the colors" (my daughter's nieces/nephews are white, black and asian) and yet we picked a very french name, very hard to pronounce for native english speakers and native japanese speakers (we've got japanese family).<p>And it's a conversation starter, for example: <i>"It's easy: the sound 'ance' (part of my kid's name) is exactly the same as how french people pronounce the 'ance' in 'France'"</i>.<p>People are <i>curious</i>. And they try to say it right. And they succeed very quickly.<p>New school this year: two months in several teachers and kids can already pronounce the name correctly.
As the born and raised local, I enjoyed it when colleagues would run by ethnic names under consideration for their kids when trying to do a bilingual name. That’s real trust.<p>Also have no idea why how/why a few Canadian-Italian families named their daughters “Andrea” which is traditionally a male name in Italy.
Data for Danish is absolute garbage. It says 18835 names for Danish compared to 410 for Norwegian. The Danish and Norwegian languages and names are extremly similar.<p>Most of the names listed for Danish/English combo does not make any sense in Denmark.
Didn't seem very useful when I tried English and Vietnamese. It suggested a lot of words that aren't names in English.<p>It's still interesting to me though. I have a daughter due in February and we're trying to come up with names now. My initial idea was to take the female name list that I downloaded from the US Census, and try to come up with a set of rules to screen out names that sound good with our family name and chosen middle name. For instance, our family name starts with a G, so i don't want to choose a name that also starts with G. I also don't want a name that rhymes or sounds silly with our family name.
Reminds me of a Russian guy I knew called anus.<p>The site misses the mark. Either the cultures share the bible in which case most biblical names are game, or they don’t in which case a phonetic similarity match is the way forward.
I don't know, but with many names, even if they are spelled the same, the pronunciation is completely different, not to mention the meaning. My approach is a bit different: I try to find a name that is native to one language but easier to pronounce in the other, so that at least the baby has a name with a full meaning that people can still pronounce easily. But I'm also fully aware that this is not always the case.
I’m Indian and I’ve got a name that’s super common in both Arabic & Hindi, almost everyone I meet from the Arab world comments on it, but it didn’t show when I chose those 2 languages.
This says Karen is good English-Japanese name.<p>To find a good name internationally recognized just open a Bible.
Anna, Maria, etc.
Some biblical names are different, though: Giovanni - John - Jan.
Don’t mean to be uncharitable but all the examples of “bilingual” names in European languages aren’t that impressive. Names shared across language families are way cooler!
I had to solve this problem too. For my first son, it wasn't that easy, it was many hours of Google searching, only to be "thwarted" by my wife's off-hand suggestion that actually worked out well.<p>For my second son, I used ChatGPT to help. It nailed it.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/xitijpatel/status/1656088692899848198" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/xitijpatel/status/1656088692899848198</a>
This is actually something I can relate to. Over the years, I've opted to shorten my name to something more "english" (I'm Afrikaans), simply because it's easier for the people around me - and also because hearing the same jokes & mispronunciations a thousand times becomes tiring. Ironically, living in Germany for a bit quickly taught me it's not always the case.
I tried with French/Korean and it yielded nothing. However we have two kids and gave them similar-ish sounding names that are both common/hard to mistake/unambiguous in each languages:<p><pre><code> - Mireille / 미래 (Mirea/Milea)
- Sarah / 사랑 (Sarang/Salang)
</code></pre>
I think this website isn't as capable or imaginative as it would look.
I once worked with a man of Bashkir-Estonian descent.
His name is Aivar which I suspect is bilingual:
- it sounds Turkic ("ai" is "moon" iirc)
- on the other hand there are mentions of Aivor/Aivar from Scandinavia and so on<p>I tried mixednames.com but Bashkir or Tatar are not available
It's hard enough finding names that people can pronounce, much less are literally cross-language. We just thought of names that various family members could <i>pronounce</i>, throwing out "impossible" sounds until we ended up with only single syllable names. It works.
This would have made things easy for us in 1997, when we were deciding on a boy's name that would be recognizable in English and Japanese. In the end, we settled on a variation of "Ken", which is the one recommended by this site anyway!<p>We struggled a lot more with our second son....
Neighbors tried this. They settled on a name that is uncommon in their native lands, and which they supposed was pronounced the same way in their cradle tongues. Perhaps it is supposed to be pronounced the same way, but his family gives the first vowel a different sound.
Cool idea, but it could use some work. For example, Italian-Spanish (Masculine) should yield 'Matteo' or 'Mateo' but seemingly doesn't because of a 't' despite being essentially the same name.
Something is not working.
Tried Danish-Dutch names. Most suggestions are not Danish at all.<p>Some of those e.g., Coen, Derk, Gerbrand
in the "Usage of X in different languages / cultures" only has a checkmark for Dutch.
I like the concept of this website but this data seems very wrong. Take a look at English and German female names. Abigail is not a German name.<p>Or take a look at Chinese and English names. Park is not Chinese...
My own name is actually only used in the very country I live in. Unexpectedly, my daughter's name is apparently also used in Arabic countries, it means something like "Gift from Allah".
I went through the list and want to say that I've never heard a third of these names in the selected language.<p>Not sure what data source it uses, but I suggest double checking before deciding a baby name.
Interesting idea - maybe gives you a starting point. However, you also need to consider pronunciation. Most likely you want a name that sounds fairly similar in both languages.
The data for English/Spanish isn't very good. My name (popular in the Anglosphere, given to me by spanish speaking parents) isn't there.
It is sad when parents give rheir children English sounding names like Kewin or Dżesika. I think Nordics have "Hary" with one "r".<p>USA has a problem of names with terrible non standard spellings.<p>One of the Freakonomics books explaind how trashy names make a child's life miserable. Even reduce job prospects.