How to know where a Chinese person is from just by the spelling of their name
Content creator Galvin Bay @galvinbay0 shared a video on TikTok on 7 Oct explaining various Chinese naming conventions.
Singaporean Chinese names largely reflect their speakers’ dialect groups, as people pronounce the same character differently across dialects.
Source: TikTok
Meanwhile, people in China always write given names as one word. Two-character names (e.g., Yao Ming) also usually appear only in China.
Taiwanese names use different spellings because the country still uses the old Wade-Giles international romanisation system, the Original Poster (OP) said in his video.
Indonesian-Chinese surnames are unique, as families had to adapt to national policy in the past to make them sound more Indonesian.
Their names tend to combine a dialect surname with Indonesian-sounding words, or are a translation of the original Chinese name’s meaning in Indonesian.
Netizens pitch in with more examples
The topic generated much discussion among netizens, who took to the comments to share more information on Chinese names.
Source: TikTok
One commenter shared that Thai-Chinese surnames are similar to Indonesian-Chinese ones in hiding the Chinese name within Thai-sounding words.
Source: TikTok
Source: TikTok
Some also shared examples of naming convention outliers from the communities discussed.
Sharing more on Chinese culture
MS News managed to speak with Mr Bay to find out more about his content.
Mr Bay, 37, explained that Chinese culture content is his main focus as he “spent several years in mainland China, and married a Chinese wife.”
“Between 2015 [and] 2019, I was in Guilin, Beijing, [and] Shenzhen”, he said.
Mr Bay also mentioned that he spent April this year travelling through China.
He even “went back to [his] ancestral village in Swatow” for his review of the Teochew movie “Dear You”.
Source: TikTok
Mr Bay was actually inspired by his experiences travelling to China for the featured video.
He told MS News that Chinese customs would “always ask me for Chinese name when [his] passport already wrote it”.
As such, the Chinese names video was meant more to educate the mainland audience, who are less accustomed to diaspora naming conventions.
Mr Bay also posted the same video to Chinese social media platform Douyin, where it accumulated more views from the largely Chinese audience.
He has also created previous videos on naming conventions, explaining that he was curious about the naming conventions for Indian and Malay people in Singapore as well.
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Featured image adapted from @galvinbay0 on TikTok.