Why getting a name right matters

The care we take to get names right is increasingly under scrutiny as Kamala Harris enters the 2024 presidential race. What message do we send when we get them wrong?

Canadian radio host Nana aba Duncan decided a decade ago she no longer wanted to go by nicknames and instead reclaim her full Ghanaian name, pronounced Nuh-NAA-buh. She put a name pronouncer in her email signature, and patiently corrected people when they didn’t get it quite right. She got a lot of – but she also still faces struggles. 

A woman at a party insisted she could never pronounce Duncan's full first name, laughing instead at how different it was and asking where she was from. "She really, really acted like I had just come from another country… I really felt like I was so foreign to her," says Duncan, who has lived in Toronto for more than 40 years. At another get-together, a guest explained that her name was hard to pronounce and unilaterally reverted to 'Nana' instead. Then there was the co-worker who sang Duncan's name to the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: "Na-Na-Na-BAAAAAA." No one else's name became a musical spectacle, just hers. 

"I feel like I'm a spoil sport if I say, 'actually, I don't think that's funny'," says Duncan, 43. "I hate that I don't put myself first in those moments, but sometimes I think we do this to keep the peace because there are so many other things that we have to deal with and we just let those things go."

Xian Zhao, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on ethnic name pronunciation, says that although many people don't realise it, habitually pronouncing an unfamiliar name incorrectly is a form of implicit discrimination. It sends a message that "you are minimal", says Zhao. "You are not important in this environment, so why should I take time and my effort to learn it">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });