The name on my birth certificate is Betty Nguyen. The name I write at the top corner of all my school assignments is Betty Nguyen. Betty Nguyen is how my name is displayed on the class roster. And, at least once every year, someone will ask me: "Betty, how do you pronounce your last name?" And my go to response to that question is, "I don't know." To be honest, this answer is a bit of a cop-out. I don't want to explain to someone how to pronounce my last name for the fiftieth time, and I honestly do not care how bad you mangle my last name. Why don't I care about my last name being mispronounced? It's a long story.
I know how to pronounce my last name . . . kind of. I pronounce "Nguyen" the same my parents pronounce "Nguyen" and my parents pronounce “Nguyen” the same way my grandparents pronounce it. So, from my perspective, there is a correct way to pronounce my last name and my pronunciation is correct. But the thing is, Vietnam has three very distinct regional dialects. As a result, there are some Vietnamese words that are pronounced differently according to which region of Vietnam you are from. According to which dialect you speak, certain syllables are pronounced differently as well. I think of the syllables “ch” and “tr” that are usually placed at the beginning of words. In some dialects these two syllables are pronounced differently. However, in the dialect I use, I can’t differentiate between the two syllables (And, of course, these syllables were the bane of my existence because I’d always use the wrong ones on spelling tests). And of course, the pronunciation of “Nguyen” is not uniform in Vietnamese. I remember watching a buzzfeed video where a Vietnamese woman was trying to teach people how to pronounce “Nguyen”. Except her pronunciation was wrong (according to me at least). So I decided to browse through youtube comments for validation, and that was the day I learned the word “Nguyen” had regional variants. So it’s hard for me to give people a definitive way to pronounce “Nguyen”, since there are variations in punctuation. So what I’m trying to say is, no matter how hard you try to pronounce Nguyen correctly, it will always be wrong according to someone. And even if there weren’t different but still correct ways to pronounce Nguyen, I would still be uncomfortable teaching you how to pronounce my last name simply because my Vietnamese sucks. Since I was born in America and English was my first language, I have a janky accent when I try to speak Vietnamese, and feel self-conscious when I have to speak Vietnamese.
Whenever I explain how to say my last name to someone, I never expect them to get it right in the first try or the tenth try. Here's how my last name is spelled in Vietnamese: Nguyễn. See that little squiggly thing (the tilde) on top of the e? In Vietnamese this accent is called “dấu ngã” and it represents a certain tone. Tones are essential in Vietnamese and messing up a tone can completely change the meaning of a word (Trust me, my parents have laughed at me for messing up tones and completely changing the meaning of sentences multiple times) There aren’t any tones in English, so it’s really hard for me (an already crummy Vietnamese speaker) to explain how to pronounce the accent in my last name. The best way I can explain tones is to compare it to a question mark. Compare the words dog and dog? It’s technically the same word but both versions of dog don’t sound exactly the same. Tones kind of work like that except, in Vietnamese except there are five tones. Anyways, the squiggly line/tilde in Nguyễn signifies that your tone should rise then fall, kind of. Most Americans mispronounce Vietnamese and my last name because of these tones. (Heck, even, I mess up on my tones all the time). Because of this linguistic divide between English and Vietnamese, I kind of expect people to mispronounce my last name. When anglicizing my last name something is literally lost in translation — since there are no accents, you have no idea what tone goes where.
I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, but this’ll make sense, I swear. Even though literally everyone in my family has the last name Nguyen, I’ve never felt like I was part of some “Nguyen” gang. And I’m not exaggerating by saying everyone in my family is named Nguyen. I never learned what maiden names were until I was fourteen, because my mother’s last name was already Nguyen before she married my dad even though they aren’t related. (You can’t judge me too hard for not knowing what maiden names are because I’m 99% sure my dad thinks maiden names are just janky middle names). People constantly ask me if I’m so and so’s brother or sister since we both share the same last name, but, usually, I’ve never seen that person in my entire life. What I’m trying to say is, for me personally, there isn’t a strong sense of community around the last name Nguyen. I’ve always been fascinated by genealogy and the idea of finding your ancestors’ family history. But the issue is, I can’t just look up my last name because thousands of people have the same last name as me and none of us are related in the slightest (except the fact that we all have Vietnamese ancestry). There’s a historical reason why so many unrelated people have the last name “Nguyen”. I know because I googled my last name for a fifth grade project once. The last dynasty that ruled Vietnam had the surname Nguyen. After the Nguyen dynasty took power, many Vietnamese people changed their last names to Nguyen because they were forced to or because changing your last name Nguyen was a sign of loyalty to the emperor. So there isn’t some grand family story or history behind my last name. My ancestors were probably some rice farmers who decided to change their last name to Nguyen out of loyalty to the emperor or something. So when people mispronounce my last name, it doesn’t feel like an attack on my identity, because I don’t attach any strong sense of identity to my last name, especially since I’ve lived in America for all my life.
What I’m about to say is going to sound cheesy, but for me, I don’t care about people’s pronunciation of my last name because it’s the thought that counts. As long as you make an effort at pronouncing my last name, I couldn't care how bad you butcher it. Part of this fluidity around my last name stems from me living in America for my whole life. As a person who has lived in America for my whole life, I’ve probably heard the mispronounced version of my last name more time then I’ve heard the correct pronunciation. I’ve grown a little attached to the bastardized mispronunciations of my name (And I’m really fond of the Nguyen-Win puns even though that pronunciation’s wrong). Even, I’ve started to code-switch a little by saying my last name differently when I’m around vietnamese or non-vietnamese people. Most days it’s really hard to differentiate which parts of me are Vietnamese and which parts or American and the pronunciation of my last name is a reflection of that. Of course, all of this is just my opinion and you might meet someone who’s a stickler for pronouncing Nguyen correctly.
And if you still, for some reason, want to know how to pronounce my last name just google it or something.
