#and folks love to trot out the same handful of extremely well known French German and Russian names

[icannotreadcursive]

There’s something that strikes me as….counterproductive? about getting pissy and accusing people of racism or xenophobia or upholding colonialism etc for not knowing how to pronounce a name, when the name is written using the orthography of a language the people not pronouncing it right don’t speak.

Cuz most of the time when this is happening, at least as far as I’ve seen, it’s in contexts when people have seen the name in writing far more than they’ve heard it spoken aloud, if they’ve heard it at all.

A lot of languages use the Latin alphabet, but they use the letters differently!

For someone to look at a name and either mispronounce it horribly because they’ve attempted to use one language’s pronunciation rules on a different language’s spelling, or to just go “I don’t know how to say that” because maybe they recognize it’s from a different language and needs to be pronounced using a ruleset they don’t know, or maybe because in their language the spelling of the name puts sounds together their language doesn’t allow next to each other—these are not moral failings.

No more so than not being able to read something aloud that’s written in a writing system you don’t know—like Cyrillic or hiragana.

Just….tell people what the correct pronunciation is. Without being accusatory about it.

If they refuse to correct, refuse to try, kick up a stink about “they should spell it a normal way!”—then they’re an asshole.

But they’re not an ass for just not knowing in the first place. And treating them like they are is not gonna help them broaden their language horizons or make them any more comfortable approaching names (or people!) that strike them as foreign.

Just…..don’t assume malice when simple lack of familiarity is sufficient explanation.