Use Bilingual Baby Name Search to Help Name Your Child
If you and your partner are of different linguistic backgrounds, you may find it difficult to find a name for your child that is compatible with both languages. Bemmu Sepponen and his partner found themselves in this position, as they were waiting for their Japanese-Finnish son and wanted the name to work in both languages.
Sepponen writes on Reddit that he originally created a bilingual baby name lookup program for personal use, but decided to expand it for others to use:
To help with the search, I wrote a tool that looks through all names in both Japanese and Finnish to find those that appear in both.
Since I thought it might be useful to others as well, I recently came back and improved it to the point where I can post it online. If you’d like to give it a try, I’ve posted it on MixedName.com .
When he first posted the tool to Reddit a couple of weeks ago, it supported 23 different languages, but requests for additional languages started coming in, and it now supports roughly 50 languages, including Arabic, Croatian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Viatnamese, and Klingon.
You can search for names of feminine, masculine, or both genders, as well as search for individual names to find out in which languages that name appears. For example, Meghan appears in English, Greek, Irish, and Welsh.
Sepponen also makes the following caveat: it is basically a tool to help you start brainstorming:
Since they are all created in software, there is no guarantee that the names are any good (for example, sometimes “Timo” is suggested for an Italian name, which would not be very good), so it is only intended to give you ideas to consider …
So don’t take it lightly – just have fun!