Different countries do things differently. Some have different alphabets, or just additional characters. Some allow middle names as separate from first or family names, while some instead do not not allow middle names, but instead allow multiple first names and/or family names. In some countries its normal to get your mother’s maiden name as a middle name or as a second part of your first name, while other contries again dictate that any and all first names should be commonly recognized as a first name and not easily mistaken as a family name.
Does all this lead to people having different “offical” names in different countries? How do your passports look if name structure or characters aren’t the same in the different countries? Does it make a difference if you were born multinational, or if you obtained it later in life?
I’m a maultinational that lives in Germany.
I come from a country that at some point in time did use different alphabets other than latin (two, not one). Even though I have all offical documents written in latin alphabet and all are in my native language + English (especially made for easier international legibility), the average german (police officer/office clerk/ etc.) is still unable to find his way around it.
It also just so happens to be that my name doesn’t contain a single vowel, so them trying to pronounce my name usually ends up being funny and lightens the spirits.
I dont have a multiple passports but i come from an English speaking country and live in a S. Korea. Here your name for almost anything needs to reflect your official government documents or else you are in for a whole world of inconvenience.
My name here is <surname> <first name> <middle name>. But here is the kicker apparently the government name system is case sensitive even if when docs are sent to me they appear all uppercase. It was through much trial and error that i discovered my middle name is not capitalized. This caused trouble opening bank accounts, importing things, getting a phone, etc
My two kids have dual nationalities (korean and another). The oldest the korean consulate in my home country for reasons we never understood they registered his name <Surname> <Middle Name> <First Name> on his passport. So when filling forms, buying tickets etc using his korean ID his given/first names is actually his middle name. This has caused a lot of problems, specially when compared side by side both of his IDs.
For the youngest one we filled the paperwork following the same pattern of the oldest, which the korean consulate guys said was correct. However, when his passport arrived his name was <Surname> <First> <Middle>… for which the consulate workers just scratched their heads and said uhh yeah anyways…
Edit: another example to follow OPs topic, my wife is korean and her passports list her name in both Hangul (korean) and Roman alphabet. Korean with Last/First + “Middle” and Roman as first + middle + last. Her IDs abroad use the roman name.
Personally, it feels like sooner or later something is going to majorly fuck up, but it hasn’t yet.
In my country of origin, only your first name is your legal name. You can have middle names on your birth certificate but they don’t get put on any other ID document. I honestly discovered I had them when moving to a new country. So now I have an ID and passport as <First name> <Family name> but my education papers and marriage certificate are <First name> <Middle name> <Family name>. Somehow nobody yet called me a scam.
To avoid this problem, my kid has <2 First names> <Family name>. That is legal in my country of origin and where they were born… but I later learned not in my partner’s country, so my kid has two passports, one with <2 First names> <Family name>, one with <First name> <Middle> <Family>.
Anecdote: a Mexican guy I knew went to the US and got a visa. Went back to Mexico then back to the US again with a new visa. Apparently, between the two visas the naming conventions changed, and his US legal name got scrambled. It was a mess to prove he was still the same person… and he never really understood why it happened.
Thanks! Honestly, this is a big part of why I asked. My partner and I are currently discovering that our newborn child (Who will most likely end up with 3 passports until old enough to make a decision) might not be able to use the same name combination in all the countries it makes sense (Dad is from one country, mom from another, and we live in a third. We are not married) for a combination of legal and cultural reasons. (2 european countries, one asian) Its a bit of a bureaucratic adventure.
We are exploring our options and looking at people who might be in similar situations :)
We only had to deal with three EU countries and it was already messy. We are married, but kept separate family names. One of the three countries did not allow the kids to have the mother’s family name (yeah equality…/s), so we had to go with the father’s family name.
I assume you already checked your situation, but few countries accept “the right of land”, aka citizenship upon birth in that country, so we didn’t have to deal too much with the country with were in. Except for filling in the birth certificate that generates all other documents.
Hah, it’s funny you ask this because I’ve been dealing with it lately.
US citizen living abroad at the moment. I have a middle name which is just, you know, vanity or whatever like it is for most people? My father’s father’s name but it doesn’t have particular meaning to me and I don’t necessarily like it. Still it came to be on my passport and I can’t recall if I did it purposefully, or if I was just filling out information, or if it was required because it was on other documentation like my birth certificate.
However it happened, it’s on the passport so now it’s on all my official documentation here in the EU. It gets picked up by every system and I can’t drop it, I have to keep propagating it because it needs to match the official documentation. It gets put in with my first name so now I’m just getting used to being “First Middle” “Last”. This is made more unusual by the fact that the country I’m in does not have middle names. All my friends are like, “Oooh, exotic!” and it’s like, no … just silly American things …
Generally though this doesn’t affect anything whatsoever, it’s just an oddity. I have simply never thought so much about my own middle name in my life and now it haunts me.
Having the exact same issue. It’s so odd for people to use my middle name everywhere.
