WHAT'S IN THE NAME?

People often asked me what my original name was and why I adapted an American first name. I was also asked how I could tell the person's ethnicity from their family name.

Let me start with a few Vietnamese family names. For example, Nguyen and Tran are like Jones and Smith in America.

Vietnamese, unlike the Chinese characters, is a monosyllabic tonal language with three distinct dialects based on distinct regional differences, Northern, Central and Southern. Again, unlike Chinese, Vietnamese people from all three regions use the same spoken language with minor differences in vocabulary. Under the French colonization in the third century, Viet Nam adopted a modified Roman alphabet and added diacritical marks with vowels to mark the appropriate tones. The French dominated Viet Nam for more than sixty years which explained the strong presence of French language and in Vietnamese cuisine.

A Vietnamese family name such as Ly often is mispronounced by Americans as Lai. Someone told me that people in Quebec knew to say Lee because y is pronounced as ee in Vietnamese as in French.

So, here are few examples of family names to help non-Asian person to know where an Asian came from -

Ly - Viet Nam

Lee - Hong Kong or Korea

Li - China

Tran or Truong - Vietnamese

Chang or Chen - Chinese

Park or Kim - Koreans

Re or Pak - Cambodians

Singh, Patel, Mythily Kamath, Pattabhi Maddipati, Asha Premachandra, Sujata Vinjamuri - East Indians

Filipinos have family names that are similar to Hispanic. For example, Eduardo Gonzales, Alberto Viloria and Esther Figueroa.

Japanese names are identified easily because of the trade relations between the two countries. Fujiwara, Hoshino or Shibusawa are a few Japanese family names.

A person with a name such as Boonchanh Soukpraseuth is from the country of Lao.

Someone from Thailand would have name such as Kongsak Tanphaichitr or Sombat Meungtaweeponysa.

By now, you probablly wonder whether I have made up all these names, especially the lengthy family names. I found these names from the Directory of Ethnic and International Resources published by International Institute of St. Louis.

As an Asian person, 95% of the time I could tell the ethnicity of the person from their facial features. Of course, the family names are secondary information to identify the country where the person came from. I hope the above information is helpful to you. Stay tune for the next discussion of the meanings of the first name and the person's social status based on their family name.