What's in a Name?

            One thing I love about America is its diversity. We are founded on the idea people are from different places, have different backgrounds, speak different languages, and follow different cultural traditions. We are founded on these and we cling to them. Growing up, my friends and I constantly compared stories of what our families did at home; my Russian friend recalled stories of a quiet game involving a story about a dead cat, my Bosnian friends brought in baklava on school Food Days, and I proudly compared differences between my Catholic upbringing and that of my protestant friends. I took the fact that people come from different cultures as a general assumption of life…but maybe that’s not always so.

            While I was recently teaching my students from Saudi Arabia and China, a question popped in my head: Do people ask others how to spell and pronounce their names in other countries in the sense that is a standard, regular question?  America’s being used to and appreciation of various languages and cultures is a rarity in the grand scheme of the world’s cultures. You can tell an Italian name, a Spanish name, an Chinese name, or an Arabic name by just looking at it, and most of the indigenous people in said countries carry names that show so. An American name, however, can be deceiving in the fact that you can’t look at it and say it’s American. You can have an American who knows no Spanish and never set foot in a Spanish country with a name of blatantly Spanish origin (take my sister’s half-Swedish boyfriend with a Mexican last name…his family goes back to Spanish conquistadors), or one with Indian, Asian, Irish, or any origin.  How cool is it that our diverse uniqueness is present not only in the fact that there is not one stereotypical “American” color or physical features (such as dark African skin, Arabic almond eyes or large Italian nose) that peg us as American, but also that there is no one type of name. Our demarcation is the fact that we are different.