If you may have noticed while reading the information under the title and subheading of this article, my name has a very apparent accent on the first of two I’s. No, it’s not a typo. It’s a common name given to girls in Brazil, where both my parents are from. My face “fit” the name, so my mom decided to gift me with it rather than the originally planned “Isabella”. By pure coincidence (note the sarcasm), my name rhymes with my sister’s, hers being Flávia.
We both have rather “odd” names if you’re speaking from the point of view of someone raised in the United States. If we had been raised in Brazil, no one would have any problem pronouncing our names with the proper placement of the accent. It’s perfectly normal there.
In most parts of the U.S. however… not so much.
Having been born and raised in America, I would have expected more people to understand the concept of a letter with an accent. The first “I” in my name has an accent over it, making it a very obvious letter to stress while pronouncing my name. However, a lot of Americans don’t really get it. They’re so used to saying “Olivia” or just “Liv” that the moment they say my full name, they always bypass the accent and say my name in a boring, almost monotone way.
It’s a Latin name, why can’t people understand that the accent is there to add a little flare; a little spiciness, if you will. I'd like to think my personality is portrayed by that flare.
Granted, when I was young and had to start making friends without my mom or dad introducing me first, I always had a few mishaps during the introductions. I would say my name correctly but people would still pronounce it as Olivia or Livia. Being a generally naive kid, I would usually just let it pass and smile when they would say it wrong. I didn't want to fight about it since so many people were saying it like that, so I just let it go. I never realized how annoying my passive nature had become until I reached my Junior year of high school and I got fed up with the wrong pronunciations. That was also around the time when I became more outspoken and social, leading me to be more aggressive about the correct pronunciation of my name.
I started adding in the accent into my papers on Word and scrawling it in an annoyingly obvious way on tests and worksheets. Whenever I was in a particularly outspoken mood, I would explain the right way to say my name and finally people would say it nicely. During my first year of college, I was particularly passionate about the correct pronunciation because I was in a different place, outside of my tiny town that I had grown up in. It was an opportunity to start over in a sense, and get the name pronunciation business out of the way.
Since there was a wider array of people in my University, my closest friends being international students, the explanation of my name was incredibly easy because they had weird names too! My parents are foreigners and my new friends are too, so the idea of a "weird" name was completely normal to them. They understood, which is something I have rarely ever come across before since I grew up in a predominantly white town. It was a relief to me.
Then again, I still had a few run-in's with people who can just not get the concept of an accent over an "I" in a name. They always screwed up my name no matter how many times I explained it, making it a dreadful experience for both of us. I would usually give them the choice of calling me "Liv", which is a nickname I don't mind.
An example of this type of hopeless case would be my Calculus teacher during the second semester of my first year. He was a very eccentric man who would find any excuse to add quick tidbits of songs whose lyrics matched his outbursts. Some of his favorites were usually Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, always deeming his terrible voice good enough to sing in a loud, obnoxious way in the middle of class. He was crazy. I still appreciated him though because he actually taught us things.
Anyways, during the fourteen weeks we had with him in the semester, he spent thirteen of them pronouncing my name completely and utterly wrong, making me wince every time.
Every day our class would meet, we would have a short conversation that would usually go like this:
"It's Lee-vee-ah."
"Lie-vee-ah?"
"No, sir, Leeeeeee-vee-ah."
He just could not get it. Eventually, I had given up, but by the last week, I made it a point to explain it to him properly in the middle of class. I think that by the end of that class, nobody in that room could possibly pronounce my name incorrectly.
Except the professor, still.
Either way, my Calculus professor had become a lost cause to me, but my friends were not. If you have a weird name too, please know that I completely understand. Eventually, you'll find people who will say it right, and one of your favorite things in life will be hearing your name slip out of someone's mouth easily.
Remember to appreciate your name and love it just as much as you love the friends the put the effort into saying it correctly.
