User:InMooseWeTrust/Bengali naming conventions

Bengali people in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere have ridiculous naming conventions that don't make any sense. However, as their homeland modernizes, this is one of the few areas where Bengali people tend to resist modernization.

Muslims

Muslims love to praise their homeland of Bangladesh and participate in all the foods and festivites. However, when it comes to their names, well... you'll see.

Muhammad/Musammat

The first thing to remember when naming a Muslim male is that his name MUST start with Muhammad (ﷺ). You can either write that in as his legal first name or simply address him as "Muhammad ______ (his name, nickname, or just Muhammad (ﷺ))." You can even call almost any Muslim man "Muhammad/Mohammed/Mahomet/etc." (ﷺ) and there is like a 90% chance he has that word somewhere in his name, so you'll be calling him by his real name. Make sure you get the right variation of the word because if he prefers Muhammad and you call him Mohammed, he will be seriously offended because you insulted the name of the Holy Prophet (ﷺ).

Sometimes the person's first name of Muhammad is written as "Md." I'll let you figure that one out.

It's the same way with females, but you call them "Musammat" because that's the female version of the name. It's far less common for women to be named Musammat, but the same rules generally apply. It's basically like Sikhism. In that religion, men are required to have "Singh" and women are required to have "Shekawat" in their full legal name for religious reasons. Why? Because God has nothing better to do than to nitpick on how much you praise him by naming your children.

Given name

As a general rule, the given name must follow no conventions whatsoever. It's the primary way for Muslims to show how pious they are. The more pious sounding the name, the more Allah will be pleased with them and their neighbors will respect them. Muslims actually gossip with each other about their children's names.

Family name (or lack thereof)

Most Muslims will refer to their family names, which usually isn't included in their full legal name or their nickname. Sometimes it's included in westernized names (or if their last name is Chowdhury), but most people aren't named that.

Marriage

Marriage creates a weird situation for both men and women, but it's much worse for women.

The man always keeps his given name after getting married. His wife will almost always be referred to as "Mrs. Husband'sName" but not necessarily his last name. Sometimes it's his first name. Sometimes it's just his nickname. For example, Alam Chowdhury might have a wife named "Mrs. Alam," or "Mrs. Rokeya Alam," or "Mrs. Alam Begum," or maybe all three on different wives at the same time. It's unclear what her birth name was, but I'm guessing it was either _________ Parvin or _________ Ferdous or _________ Nesa. Or maybe she didn't even have a last name, and was only referred to as "Musammat/Miss (given name, just one word)."

There is an extremely strict taboo against married couples calling each other by their name. The taboo is much worse with women, to the point where most women feel shame if someone asks them "What is your husband's full legal name?" and she doesn't answer. Some couples resort to calling each other by their nicknames or pet names between spouses, or words like "Ogo" or "Ey" which can mean "Hey, you" or "That." The majority of Bengali Muslim married couples just call each other "____'s Mom/Dad," usually but not always in reference to their first child.

The pious ones

There is always one pious person (most likely a "Hujur") who has to nitpick on Muslims' names. They demand proper Arabic pronunciation and their version of proper Arabic loanword spellings. They HATE the idea of nicknames, often going to great lengths to criticize parents whom they catch calling their children nicknames.

unorganized, will edit later

The recent 2011 population census shows that 87% of all Bangladeshis share only nine surnames - Ali, Ahmed, Khan, Hassan, Hossain, Rahman, Islam, Uddin or Zaman. For the sake of telling them apart, you'd hope that they'd have different given names, right? Most Bangladeshis, sadly, are so lazy, they didn't bother innovating nicknames either - you can walk into any square and yell out Babu, Meem, Bijoy, Manik or Abdul and surely have a response. It is also a common trend to have random letters as first names - Md, Sk, ASM, AFMB, SM, and so on. People with low social status will often have the word 'bin' as their middle name.

Muslim Bangladeshis have a passion for names ending in 'ul', 'ur', 'un' or 'uz' i.e. Abdul, Enamul, Habibul, Ashraful, Aminul, Sirajul, Saiful, Badrul, Shariful, Raqibul, Mujibur, Shahidur, Zillur, Moinur, Qamrun, Shamsuz (O.K., you get the picture). 99 per cent of Bangladeshis have to share only eleven surnames. These are Islam, Rahman, Hossain, Alam, Uddin, Chowdhury, Ah"a"med, Ali, Miah, Begum & Haque. To try and distinguish between all those who inevitably end up with the same name they have an endearing habit of using their family nickname, (e.g. Joy, Baby, Bulbul, Lovely, Nunu, Sweety, Babu, Panu e.t.c.) even in the most formal circumstances. So when the next middle aged Bangladeshi Nobel prize winner is presented to the General Secretary of the U.N. at a solemn ceremony, the whole world will get to find out what his mother informally called him when he was two years old.

However, the naming sometimes backlashes because if somebody important in the village (like the union councilmen, local doctors, store owners, etc.) names his kid something, some peasant will name his kid the same thing. To avoid that, some families have "family secret" nicknames and public nicknames. On top of that, there's the real name which nobody uses. After adulthood, people will use their real names in public correspondences but with the public nickname stuck at the end of the name. After a year or two of using the public nickname, everyone forgets the family secret nickname anyway.

A minority of Bangladeshis can't be bothered to buy into all the above nonsense so give their children completely random names which they seem to have plucked out of thin air, e.g. Pavel, Vladimir, Russell, Chocolate, Rebecca, Lincoln, Dollar, Lemon, Nefertiti, Leighton, Money, Honey, Juicy, Munich etc..

It's even worse with married couples. When people first get married, they don't call their spouse anything at all. When people ask, they say "my husband" or "my wife" or something along those lines. To each other, they have a normal conversation but avoid using the name like saying it will cause their spouse horrible pain. After a kid gets born, people refer to their spouse as "So-and-so's Mom or Dad," usually in terms of the oldest child. So for example, if the oldest son's public nickname is Babu, the father will say, "Babur Amma! Bhaat ranna koro!" (Babu's Mom! Cook some rice!)

The "real" names have no bearing on anything at all. For example, in a family, there might be three kids named "Rafiqul Islam Sardar," "Bibi Kulsum Sultana," and "S.M. Akash." You can also get crazy matches between siblings (like "Sheikh Abu Taher Muhammad Musa" and "Sheikh Abul Hayat Muhammad Isa") just for kicks. So what family do they belong to? Well, the majority of people know if they belong to the "Sheikh," "Saha/Shaha," "Sarder/Shardar," etc.. families because their fathers told them so. Except if they're from the Chowdhury family, you can always find that in their name (because the Chowdhurys are a stuck-up wealthy family that likes to show off to the lowlife peasants they own). For the rest of them, in the rare occasion where they actually put their family name into their kid's name, they can stick it either in the front or the back. When women get married and take on their husband's name, the same thing applies, but they will adopt whatever part of their husband's name they like. There are also lots of people with "S.M." stuck in front of their name, but no one knows what it stands for. Only men will have this in their name, and it's only common within certain families. Almost all of the names of Bengali names are highly Bengalicized Arabic or Farsi, so what two characters from the Latin alphabet is doing in so many people's names is a huge mystery.

The names also tend to be very sexist, even last names. Men are allowed to get names like Khan, Ali, Aziz, Ahmed, etc. while women are allowed to get names like Hasina, Begum, Nesa, etc.. Sometimes, they just add an "a" to the masculine name to make it feminine. For example, the female equivalent of "Hamid Sultan" will be "Hamida Sultana." This blatant sexism may or may not exist in the wife's name (the part that she took from her husband).

Hindus

Unlike the huge mess that makes up Muslim names, Hindus are comparatively tame but still maintaining their quirks and oddities.

Given name

Given names are usually similar to names given all over North India, usually with slightly different pronunciations or spellings for linguistic and cultural variation. The names can be simple, like Amit, Parth, Narayan, Rana, etc. or long and impossible to pronounce unless you speak Indian languages, like Indranil, Radhakrishnan, Dhanalakshmi, Bhuvaneswari, etc.. They may or may not use nicknames.

Although less common than Muslims, Hindus often give their children lofty names to brag about their status or make them seem more pious. For example, Srikrishna (literally "Lord Krishna") and Om (Sanskrit word for "God"). It's also extremely common for Hindus to name their children based on when or where they were born, like Shumbho (can mean "of Monday") or Rabindranath Tagore (who was obviously born on a Sunday).

Middle name

Middle names are less common than in the west, and they can either be the same word as their first name or a separate word entirely. In formal and informal situations, they may or may not write or speak the middle name as part of the first name as a compound name, or as a separate word, with varying degrees of consistency. Generally speaking, they write the middle name as a separate word in English and a compound word in Bengali. They usually introduce someone by their first name only or by first and last name for western audiences (in any language) and informal situations when speaking Bengali. The two most common middle names among Bengali Hindus are "Nath" and "Kumar," with the former more likely to be represented as the same word as their first name and the latter more likely to be written separately.

Family name

Unlike Muslims, most Bengali Hindus use fairly consistent family names like westerners. Most have last names based on historical families, castes, or tribes. However, there is a subset of Bengali Hindus that have last names in English that end with the suffix "-jee" when they don't write it like that in Bengali. Take the example of some famous Bengali politicians.

• Pranab Kumar Mukherjee, President of India since July 2012. His name in Bengali is "প্রণবকুমার মুখোপাধ্যায়" pronounced "Pranabkumar Mukhopaddhay." His first and middle name in English are a compound name written in Bengali.
• Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal since May 2011. Her name is "মমতা বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়" pronounced "Momota Bondhopaddhay."
• Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal 2000-2011. His name is " বুদ্ধদেব ভট্টাচার্য" pronounced "Buddhodeb Bhattocharj" which sounds more normal.

At first, I thought it was a high caste thing but I met some low caste Bengali Hindus with names like that. Who knows?

There's also some inconsistencies caused by westerners badly writing people's names, where Bengalis writing in either English or Bengali not sure how to write someone's name. Take for example, Rabindranath Tagore, whose given Bengali name is রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর pronounced "Rabindranath Thakur."

Prefixes and suffixes

However, they will sometimes add terms like "Shri" at the beginning (as a title of respect, sort of like Lord or Sir) even when the situation doesn't call for it or "Ghosh" at the end (I was told it means they are bakers). Actually, most Indian names are compounds of multiple Sanskrit words so you can stretch this idea to your heart's content.

Nicknames

Hindu nicknames work exactly like Muslim nicknames, but they're used less often in formal situations and most people nowadays don't even have them anymore. It's less likely for Hindus to have Muslim given names as their nicknames than the other way around.