Cleveland Evans: Hard-to-say name will make you less likable

Do people find your name hard to pronounce? If some new research holds up, this could be more of a problem than you think.

Psychologists Simon Laham, Peter Koval and Adam Alter published "The Name Pronunciation Effect: Why People Like Mr. Smith More Than Mr. Colquhon" in the latest issue of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They found that people judged easy-to-pronounce names and their bearers more positively in several studies.

They first asked Australian college students to rate surnames from five nationalities on how easily they were pronounced and how much they liked them.

The Polish name Leszczynska was rated most difficult, but students thought Polish Kozinski was easy. Among Russian names Katorjevskaya was difficult and Vasilenko easy. Other hard vs. easy pairs were Greek Vougiouklakis vs. Philippidis, English Boumphrey vs. Benson and Irish MacEochagan vs. O'Sullivan. Not surprisingly, students liked easy-to-pronounce names better.

The psychologists then had Australians read a fake newspaper article about a man running for a local council election.

All versions of the article used the same first name, but varied the candidate's surname. They used the hard vs. easy Greek names Vougiouklakis and Lazaridis and Polish Leszczynska and Paradowska.

Lazaridis and Paradowska were rated much better council candidates than Vougiouklakis and Leszczynka, even though all names were rated equally "unusual."

Laham, Koval and Alter then made a list of 500 American lawyers whose names they found on law firm websites. American college students rated the names on how easy they were to pronounce and whether they were "Anglo-American" or "foreign."

Lawyers who were partners within their firms had names easier to pronounce than those who held the lower position of associate. This finding held up when just lawyers who had Anglo-American names and just those who had "foreign" names were examined.

The conclusion was that how easy one's name is to pronounce affects how likely one is to be promoted, at least for American lawyers.

Of course researchers need to study this more to see how important the name pronunciation effect is outside of law firms.

The research so far is about how easy it is for someone raised in an English-speaking culture to guess how a certain spelling is pronounced, not necessarily how hard certain sounds are to say. Someone who knows the rules of Polish or Irish Gaelic spelling might find Leszczynka and MacEochagan easy.

Part of what makes a name seem easy to pronounce is familiarity. Michael, for instance, actually has an odd pronunciation according to normal spelling conventions. Someone just learning English would never guess it rhymes with "cycle" but would probably say "Mitch Ale."

I'd also bet most Americans rate Beyoncé and Gyllenhaal much "easier" today than they would have a few decades ago.

Still, one of the main reasons immigrants change their names is to make them easy for Americans to pronounce. I once had a student with English surname Kenyon. His family's origin was Armenian.

Their original name was Amirkhanian. When my student's aunt graduated from high school around 1940, she applied for a bank teller's job. The bank said they couldn't hire her because "Miss Amirkhanian" would be too hard for customers to pronounce. So the whole family changed their last name to Kenyon so she could get the job.

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