International Naming Conventions

My wife is from Myanmar, where most people only have one name (no first, last, etc.) and has experienced endless frustration since immigrating here to the US. It's been quite difficult for her and even limiting in some ways and she's broken down in tears more than once.Some places just put a few letters into each field (like say for the name Jessica, first: Jes, middle: si, last: ca, or something like that). The DMV did that, and then listed her name on her license as \&

1/2/3/4: a friend of mine uses her maiden name professionally, her husband’s surname for things like bank accounts5: Middle names are common but optional in the UK, I have one but my dad had two.6: my full name, including middle name, is longer than the default space available in most paper forms which gives you separate box for each letter. String together any three 8-character first/middle/family names for same effect7/8: In 2002, Richard James changed hi

I lived in Asia for many years and worked with people from many places there.It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.There are people who wish to be called by their ful

Non-American here. I believe US citizens often have a middle name. We Spanish-speaking people have 2 last names. Japanese reverse the "firstname" and "lastname". I had a lot of troubles when I tried to buy a ticket in a Chinese website a few years back. So no 99% of the users don't follow the "firstname" and "lastname" pattern. We might put up with it, but it doesn't suit 99% of the users as stated.

Yes please! My wife and I constantly struggle with this kind of thing. When there's just a "name" field that permits some high number of characters, it's fine.Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identificati

You do know that not every country/culture has the same first name/last name etc calling practices, right?

Even in countries where you might assume this is true, it's not always!For instance in China, most names are single character family name followed by a two character given name. Some rare family names are two characters and usually they will have a single character given name. Some people have single character family name and single character given name.Then you get people from different ethnic groups who put the family name at the end. Often these are characterised by a long given na

What do you mean we shouldn't have a first and last name input?explains the naming conventions of every culture on the planet

I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer.She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck you), would often end up in tears after hours of pleading to them s

In an increasingly international world, making any assumptions about names is just asking for trouble. In some cases even the first name / last name structure doesn't hold up. It's probably best to just assume that the name can be represented by a free-text field.