Every time I tried to decrypt my family name, I ended up discovering more and more complex stories. Born in Sri Lanka, I used to think I have an authentic Sinhalese name. But as I grew up, I started to realise that its originality has fuzzy edges where I expected sharp boundaries.
Most Sinhalese names comprise five or six words, but for non-official usages, people usually stick to only their first name followed by their surname (or sometimes the other way around). You often don’t get to know the full name of a person unless you look at their passport or attend their wedding.
My parents and grandparents were born in the colonial era ( Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon then),. So they both got English first names and Sinhalese surnames. My paternal grandfather is Adhikariarachchi-lage William (the family name followed by the first name that he used day-to-day, rather than his full name). My two maternal uncles are Bernard Wijerathna and Dudley Wijerathna (first name followed by family name, and not the full name).
In Sri Lanka, there are quite a few Sinhalese people with Portuguese and Dutch surnames as well.
I have a surname that is made of 16 letters: ‘Adhikariarachchi’. Quite often people mispronounce it, but I don’t mind because I too mispronounce names, so I certainly understand. But what I most certainly don’t enjoy is people complaining about it and trying to shorten it without my permission.
A few MCs who tried and failed to pronounce my surname apologised to me, and I’m glad that they made an effort.
I used to enjoy giving tips on how to pronounce it, and I would explain why Sri Lankan names are long. (Sri Lankan names are too intricate, so I’m not going to explain it here!) ‘Adhikariarachchi’ is actually the combination of two names, ‘Adhikari’ and ‘Arachchi’, so the easiest way to pronounce it is to read it as two separate words.
I like how my surname sounds, and I wouldn’t ever dream of changing it or shortening it. As the years passed, I learned that ‘Adhikari’ is a common name in Nepal as well. In fact, Man Mohan Adhikari was the 31st Prime Minister of Nepal from 1994 to 1995. Perhaps my surname is proof that anyone can belong anywhere.
The truth is my full name is shorter compared to most other Sri Lankan names. My mother has six entire words in her full name, and my friend has five. Such names start with the family name that comprises two or three words, then the first name, then the middle name, and then it ends with the same (or another) family name.
Although my father’s side has a similar name structure, my father deliberately made the full names of his two daughters shorter. So my sister and I got just three words: first name, middle name, and family name. My father says that he guessed his children would either study abroad or migrate and in that case, he knew the longer names would be too difficult to use.
When I have kids someday, I might make their names much shorter as well. I’ve seen people with Sri Lankan roots worry that their kids will be bullied at school or will not land lucrative jobs when they grow up because of their foreign names.
Their kids get shorter names, and their first name or second name is an English one (much like the names of my uncles that were born in Ceylon). It might feel like another way of colonisation for some people, but who are we to judge someone based on their name?
If I start digging at the roots of English names, I might find that they are from the South Asian region, or specifically Sri Lanka. Kind of like how Toula’s dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding finds out that every English word, was derived from a Greek word!
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