Who would we be if we had a different name?— issue #76

Names are fascinating. In a few simple words, they weave a story of places, beliefs, and people. They are highly personal and identify us as unique individuals. At the same time, they also reflect social bonds—given to us from birth, and a reflection of where we come from. 

My name, for example, contains rich information about my heritage, ethnicity, dialect group, gender, and the generation I am from. All my paternal female cousins have names that start with the same character (佩, pèi), and my surname (罗, luó) is unique to my dialect group. As a kid I used to think it was boring, but now I’m proud to know I carry the stories of sojourners that left Dapu, China, decades ago for a better life. 

When we look beyond the typical first and last name conventions, we are exposed to a world rich with stories. In our latest story about the diversity of Asian naming practices, we see that names come from a variety of origins. For one, not everyone’s names are from their fathers. At a recent conference, I met individuals whose names indicate the specific village in Nigeria, or the Greek island that they hail from, or how it changes by gender. Our sense of belonging can be rooted so differently to family ancestry or place, depending on what is important to us. Sometimes it can be about fortune, as in Thai naming practices drawn from Tamrataksa (ตำราทักษา), a traditional astrology text. Our Thai teammate, Khunthida (กุลธิดา), has a name that avoids her inauspicious characters based on her date and time of birth.

For these reasons, it is painful when one is forced or pressured to change one’s name. Our story looked into examples where political and cultural changes have compelled or forced communities to change their names. For example, Koreans who lost their clan names under Japanese colonial rule, or Indigenous people in Taiwan made to take on Chinese names. 

When it comes to places, retaining or losing names becomes a sensitive issue and is often political. We published a story back in 2023 discussing the Indigenous names of Singapore’s offshore islands and their meanings. This past month, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced plans to join several of its southern islands through land reclamation to form a new “Western Island”. This threatens to erase what is left of these unique islands, once inhabited by Singapore’s Indigenous islander communities.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet suggests that the intrinsic qualities of a being does not change regardless of its name, but many would disagree. They are clearly imbued with more—power, history, and a bold stake in our future. 

Most of us can't live without spices in our food, which is a convenience that comes at the cost of a complex and darker colonial past.

Learn how Han Chinese names have evolved over the decades, and how the same characters in a name can be shared by millions of others.

Our co-founder Peiying muses on her educational background as a history major, and how much of a role history plays in the field of data visualisation, given that historical study is fundamentally about analysing and visualising data.

In recent years, the name Nusantara has been adopted for Indonesia's new capital in Kalimantan. But the term itself has been in use for centuries. Taking its name from the Old Javanese nusa ("island") and antara ("between"), it first appears in a General of Majapahit empire’s oath to conquer the "outer islands" beyond Java. Today the term has grown broader, usually referring to places where the Malay language is spoken, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and southern Thailand, no longer bound to Majapahit's old sphere of influence.