Reading and Righting the Names at a Convocation Ceremony: Influences of Linguistic Ideologies on Name Usage in an Institutional Interaction

Abstract

At a Canadian university with a diverse population, orators at convocation ceremonies follow a protocol to facilitate the correct pronunciation of names. I describe the protocol and analyze one name-announcement segment, incorporating data from interviews with faculty and students. I argue that linguistic ideologies influence and reflect the way names are used in institutional interactions. In an institutional discourse of multiculturalism, names are seen as symbols of persons, and efforts to say names correctly are demonstrations of respect. This can be undermined by orators’ practices, which focus on names as words and mark some non-English names as “difficult,” such as repeated verification and halting pronunciation. For students with these names, this may contribute to negative feelings about being treated as outsiders in the dominant society. Attention to linguistic ideologies reveals that the university’s protocol is as much a mechanism for reducing uncertainty among orators as for treating students respectfully.

Keywords:

• personal names
• identity
• linguistic ideology
• institutional interactions
• university
• Canada

This research was financially supported by the University of Western Ontario. Vanessa Girouard, Gillian Schnurr, Sarah Shulist, and Flannery Surette made valuable contributions as research assistants. Tania Granadillo and the participants at the 2013 American Names Society meeting are gratefully acknowledged for the insights and information they provided on an early version of this paper.

Notes

1 I use the term linguistic ideology consistently here. See Woolard (1998) for a discussion of the synonymous use of language ideology, linguistic ideology, and ideology of language.

2 I classified components as “English” or “non- English,” according to my own subjective evaluations as a native Canadian English speaker. “English” names are familiar and “easy” for monolingual Canadian English speakers to pronounce, while “non-English” names are those which obviously originate from another language and/or which present ambiguity in pronunciation for monolingual English speakers. This classification was only used to get a broad sense of the number of names for which orators might have difficulty in determining a single preferred pronunciation.

3 See Pina-Cabral (2010) for a related discussion of the ontological weight of “true names” relative to pseudonyms, nicknames, and translations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Pennesi

Karen Pennesi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario, where she teaches courses in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Her current research investigates the difficulties and coping strategies of immigrants to Canada who have non-English personal names.

Correspondence to: Dr Karen Pennesi, Department of Anthropology, Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada. Email: [email protected]