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?
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.