If you and your partner come from different language backgrounds, you may find yourself struggling to land on a baby name compatible with both languages. That’s the position Bemmu Sepponen and his partner found themselves in as they were expecting their Japanese-Finnish son and wanted a name that would work in both languages.
Sepponen writes on Reddit that he initially created the Bilingual Baby Name Finder for personal use, but decided to expand it for others to use:
To help with the search I wrote a tool which looks through all the names in both Japanese and Finnish, to find ones which appear in both.
Since I figured others might find this useful as well, I recently went back and improved it to the point that I could release it online. If you’d like to try it, I put it up at MixedName.com.
When he first posted the tool to Reddit a couple of weeks ago it supported 23 different languages, but the requests for additional languages started pouring in and it now supports approximately 50 languages, including Arabic, Croatian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Vietnamese — and Klingon.
You can search for names that are feminine, masculine, or both, and you can also look up individual names to see which languages that name appears in. Meghan, for example, appears in English, Greek, Irish, and Welsh.
Sepponen also includes this caveat: This is mainly a tool to help you start brainstorming:
Since all of these are generated in software, there are no guarantees that the names are any good (for instance it sometimes suggests “Timo” for an Italian name, which wouldn’t be great), so it is intended to only give you ideas to consider.
So don’t take it super seriously — just have fun with it!
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