When Americans are asked for their “full name,” they generally understand it to mean first, middle, and last name. First names can be literally anything at this point. Not everyone has a middle name, but most people born in the United States do. Last names have traditionally been passed down through a father’s family, but that convention has given way to all kinds of alternatives, from mom’s last name to hyphenated combos to last names couples choose for themselves.

Even with those variations, first/middle/last is the name norm in the U.S., Canada, and much of Europe. But that doesn’t mean it’s a universal standard. In fact, as self-described “word nerd” Rob Watts points out in a RobWords video, it’s actually an unusual naming convention compared to the rest of the world.

What we can’t tell from our ‘standard’ naming convention

We may think of a name’s purpose as identifying a specific person, but historically, names have done much more than that. In many places worldwide, they still do. Just not in what we call “the West.”

“Our names tell us surprisingly little,” Watts says. “From mine, Robert Watts, you can’t work out my parents’ first names, whether I’m the older or younger sibling, the precise year I was born, or where my ancestral home was.”

We don’t even expect our names to convey any of that information. But each of those details can be found in the traditional naming conventions of other cultures. Our largely uninformative names are a bit of an anomaly on the world stage. The only information our first, middle, and last names contain (with the exception of “junior” first names) is our family name. But even how our family name gets conveyed or carried on differs from other cultures.

Last name first, first name second?

In Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and China, the family name comes first, then your “first” name, or the name your parents chose for you. So if you meet someone from Japan and they introduce themselves as Watanabe Shinji, Watanabe is actually their last name, and Shinji is their first name.

“Japanese people have often, historically, switched their names around when dealing with English speakers or when moving to English-speaking countries,” Watts explains. “But that’s actually a practice that is dying out ever since, in 2020, the Japanese........

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