“Ramen? Oh, wait no Raheem? No, no, Rimeen! Ugh, sorry Rumeen! There we go!”
Now unphased after the many many years of butchered attempts to pronounce my name, I still always felt like the pronunciation both written and spoken of it reflected that of English phonics, and was confused as to why even after verbally correcting someone, they still struggled to pronounce my name correctly. Knowing that this was a problem that my friends who also have names of a non-English origin or “foreign” names, it fascinated me how much people struggled to emulate the sounds that were coming from our mouths, even in the most simple sounds, such as that of vowels and/or sounds that also exist in the English language. The reading of the paper “Phonetic acquisition in cortical dynamics, a computational approach,” by Dematties and Rizzi, their discussion of phonemes and how humans are able to discriminate between phonemes and other aspects of language in order to label and categorise them, even with varying factors such as pitch, tone, accent etc, struck this fascination of phonetics and pronunciation of words and names even more and I was curious to know if there was a societal and psychological implication to the repeated mispronunciation of names.
The paper mentions how “[processing] focus[es] on a context in which basic linguistic units - such as phonemes - are extracted and robustly classified by humans and other animals from complex acoustic streams in speech data” (Dematties et al 2019). So when an individual will verbally correct another on the pronunciation, the other individual should be mentally extracting and processing each sound in the name, and hypothetically should be able to emulate those basic sounds based on that breakdown. Part of that certainly comes from the conscious effort one may need to put in or a contributing factor to that struggle could be an auditory processing disorder, however, I wonder, for those on the receiving end of that frequent mispronunciation and disregard for the effort required, does society view (whether intentionally or unintentionally) a certain importance with more familiar or easier to pronounce names and are there psychological impacts that manifest over time for those whose names are repeatedly mispronounced?
Reflected on by Dr. Simon Laham, a researcher with the University of Melbourne, Australia, “Names are rich sources of information. They can signal gender, ethnicity, or class; they may connote personality characteristics ranging from warmth and cheerfulness to morality. But names also differ in a much more fundamental way: some are simply easier to pronounce than others” (Lamam et al). In relation to the phonics of a word or name, Laham expands stating that,
“One relatively understudied instance of processing fluency is phonological fluency, which is a function of how easy it is to pronounce a word (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Some research shows that phonologically fluent stocks are expected to perform better (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006), that easy-to-pronounce words are defined more concretely than difficult-to-pronounce words.” This phenomena manifests socially with people and their names as well, creating the name-pronunciation effect which Laham’s research states “that easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) will be judged more positively than difficult to pronounce names.” The social impact of this can be seen in the professional workplace, where, for example, “people with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms.”
This phenomena then brings for the implication of microaggressions. That the disregard of attempting unfamiliar or uncommon phonemes of names comes from a place of indolence more than it does the actual inability to process or pronounce said sounds. In the summer of 2021, a student at The American School in London wrote an article titled “Name Pronunciations Leave Lasting Impact on Individuals,” interviewing fellow students on the mispronunciation of their names and the long term psychological impact that has had. The common theme amongst student sentiments towards this are frustration, feeling disrespected, decreased confidence and impaired self-image, as well as a lack of self worth; and often not caused by the actual mispronunciation, but by the lack of care and effort for others to correct their mistakes. This social impact is also more often seen with people of color, where an individual may be more likely to make more of an effort to pronounce, for example, Tchaikovsky, a typically white, European name, than they would Gajendragadkar, an Indian name.
While certain phonemes are certainly more difficult than others, I believe that more often than not, the processing of these more difficult or unfamiliar phonemes is not the culprit of repeated mispronunciation, especially after correction, but rather an indifference to making the effort to pronounce one’s name correctly. Considering how common this phenomena is worldwide, I would really enjoy and be interested in seeing more research done on further long term psychological and social impacts that name mispronunciations have on individuals, as well as potentially studies done on individuals responses in the brain to their own name being pronounced correctly vs incorrectly.
References
Adil, Zainab Shafqat. “Name Mispronunciations Leave Lasting Impact on Individuals.” The Standard, June 10, 2021 https://standard.asl.org/18485/features/name-pronunciations-leave-lasting-impact-on-individuals/.
Laham, Simon M., et al. “The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Why People like Mr. Smith More than Mr. Colquhoun.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 48, no. 3, 2017, pp. 752–756., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.12.002.
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