“Did I say that right? Tell me how to say it. I’ll do it right.” I have heard this numerous times, and I always respond with, “No, but it’s fine.” I don’t say that passive-aggressively. It really is fine. I came to the United States expecting people to mispronounce my name. 

Riddhima is a Sanskrit word meaning “full of love and prosperity.” I do not speak Sanskrit, but Hindi uses the same letters, and many Indian languages utilise similar alphabets. For an Indian, saying my name would not be a struggle. But I am not in India anymore. 

There are letters in my name which are exclusive to some Indian languages, especially the “ddhi” part. To get it perfectly, you would have to learn how the sound is produced and what parts of the mouth are involved in it. Those who speak French, know how difficult it is to produce the ‘r’ sound and how much time and patience it requires to get that single letter even close to proper. These are difficult tasks. All around the world people speak from different parts of their mouths, which creates accents. If you have ever read Pygmalion or watched My Fair Lady, you would remember that Professor Higgins, a professor of phonetics, could tell exactly where a person was from based on how they spoke. Knowing all this, I logically cannot expect people foreign to my language to say my name perfectly. And to people who do not know me well, I cannot expect the commitment it requires to learn the word. 

So I understand if someone messes up a little bit. But does that make mispronouncing my name alright? While it’s okay for others to mispronounce it, I do put emphasis on the fact that they are not saying it correctly. I do care about people acknowledging the fact that what they are saying is not really how you say it. It is okay for you to say my name as Redeemer, as long as you know that it is not correct. While we may say things differently, we can hear the same sounds.

This ideology can take different forms. One of my closest friends, Xinyan Fu, wrote an op-ed in the Berkeley Beacon about abandoning her Chinese name for the sake of cultural conformity. While the article describes her experience of having to take up an English name and why this concept is unnecessary, it highlights the acceptance of mispronunciations.  

It is popular in East Asia to adopt an English name as an acknowledgment that people foreign to the Chinese language would not be able to say their real name. Chinese is a tonal language that uses the Pinyan character system. The characters employed are meant to spell sounds, which cannot be properly translated into English. This linguistic concept makes it difficult for others to pronounce Chinese words, and as a result, names. Journalism Major Xinyi Tu ‘22 is an international student from China. She says that at Emerson she always asks people to use her English name; she is more used to being called Cynthia in the U.S. “I feel like I should use it for their convenience, but also for mine because if they pronounced it incorrectly I might not respond to it,” says Tu. 

Certain people choose to use nicknames to make pronunciation easier. My brother, who also lives in the United States, goes by Sid. His full name is Siddharth, but saying it is difficult and he chose to opt-out of explaining his name while here. This is common for people of India. Journalism Major Shruti Rajkumar ‘22, an American of Indian descent, says that she personally Americanised her name. “When they try to say my name, no matter how much they tried, it would always sound off. So I use my Americanised name there and then my real name at home,” says Rajkumar. She mentioned that her friend Abhinaya often goes by Abby since it is easier for her.

 It is okay to say my name the best way that you can. It will not reflect poorly on you and certainly does not make me or my name feel insignificant in any way. But simple things like taking the effort to learn the pronunciation or apologizing for butchering it will make me appreciative. It would show me that you do care about identifying me properly, even if you cannot.