Bay Area tech firm helps universities with hard-to-pronounce names

The list arrived as it does every year, filled with names and accomplishments.

As Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford’s School of Medicine, scanned through, his eyes stopped.

The name belonged to a graduating medical student. Her last name contained 26 letters.

“He freaked out,” Assistant Dean Mijiza Sanchez said, recalling the preparations for last year’s graduation.

So, Minor practiced. Using software developed by Stanford alumnus Praveen Shanbhag, the dean read the list while listening to students pronounce their own names in prerecorded messages.

He mimicked their cadence, noted their emphasis, and repeated the names over and over again.

When graduation day came, the student with the 26-letter name ascended the stage. Minor didn’t miss a syllable.

The student beamed. She gave him a high-five.

“Pronouncing a person’s name right is all about taking the time to respect someone’s sense of identity,” said Shanbhag, founder and CEO of NameCoach. “Academia is succeeding in creating a more diverse community and more diverse campuses and with that comes more diverse names. Respecting people’s identity is a core element of inclusion. Names are a core part of that, they’re a core element of who a person is and where they come from.”

This year, Stanford will be one of about 250 schools around the country using NameCoach to make sure no student’s name goes mispronounced at commencement and award ceremonies. It’s a novel concept with a simple solution: allow administrators to hear how the students say their names.

“Having to stand up and announce hundreds of names only to butcher them is very embarrassing,” said Sanchez, whose first name is pronounced Meh-JEE-za. “I’ve lived for 40 years with a name that people find difficult to pronounce. Now seeing something like this at work is really cool.”

Long-term effects

Children who grow up hearing their names regularly mispronounced, studies have shown, are more likely to feel alienated, unwelcome and, in some cases, may perform worse academically. Many shrink away from attention and try to avoid being called on in class.

The study cites a story of a Chinese American girl in Oregon who skipped graduation after an administrator mispronounced her name and laughed, causing the rest of the audience to laugh at his mistake — but, the girl felt, at her expense. As soon as she was able to, the study explained, she changed her name to Anita.

“While the racial undertones to the mispronouncing of names in schools are often understated, we argue that these are racial microagressions — subtle daily insults that, as a form of racism, support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority,” wrote the authors of a 2012 study called “Teachers, please learn our names!”

The study recounts numerous stories of individual students who felt alienated, judged, embarrassed, ashamed and anxious when teachers would read their names aloud.

Some, like 10-year-old Freddie Golán, would correct his teachers and peers when they would call him a name that sounded like “gallon.” Others, like Natália, a seventh-grader, decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She told her teachers to just call her Natalie.

A boy named Nitin, whose name that means “right path” in Sanskrit, had a teacher rename him “Frank” when the man could not pronounce Nitin’s name. Nitin went on to call himself “Frank” for the rest of his school years.

Last year, Santa Clara County’s office of education and the California Association for Bilingual Education launched a campaign called “My Name, My Identity” that asks educators to pledge to pronounce their students’ names correctly and seeks to educate the public about the potential pitfalls of mispronunciation.

To the group, pronouncing students’ names correctly telegraphs respect and places a premium on diversity.

Shanbhag, who grew up in Ohio, said his own name was mispronounced “fairly often” in school. After a while, he barely noticed. (It’s “shawn-bog,” by the way.)

“It becomes kind of a background thing. I mean, you can’t go around being offended your whole life,” he said. “But when I reflected on it later, it was like death by a thousand cuts. You realize how alienated over time you feel because of it.”

Pronunciation tool

But in 2010, Shanbhag’s sister graduated from college. Relatives had flown in from all over the country to attend her commencement ceremony.

When they called her to the stage, her name — Pratima Ramesh Shanbhag — “got completely mangled,” her brother said.

“I was livid,” Shanbhag said. “I think when it’s a loved one, a family member, you’re more protective, more likely to feel like something needs to be done to fix this. Because you don’t want to see them go through that.”

Two years later, he created the first version of NameCoach.

The software asks students to record audio clips pronouncing their own names. It pairs the recordings with suggested pronunciation notes attached to a roster of names that an educator can reference, study and supplement with their own notes. Final pronunciation notes, in whatever form the reader has indicated he or she will understand, can be printed on reference cards.

The service, offered to schools as an annual subscription, can be used for a variety of events, Shanbhag said, not just graduations.

“Really, you can use this in any situation in which you need to talk to someone and you don’t know them personally,” he said, noting the company is looking to expand into arenas beyond academia, including sports announcing, naturalization ceremonies, diplomacy and customer service.

“Within academia,” he said, “you can use this so teachers know the names of students before classes begin, or advisers know how to pronounce the names of their students. It can help schools not mess up when they’re about to call an alumnus and try to get a donation.”

Individuals who want to link a pronunciation guide to their social media pages can do so by creating what Shanbhag calls a NameBadge — a page with an audio recording, suggested pronunciation guide, photo and space to write about your name’s origin or meaning.

Several Bay Area schools, including Stanford and UCSF, have adopted the program.

UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which held its commencement this month, signed on for next year. Students at Stanford will receive their diplomas on June 11. In the weeks to come, somewhere on the medical school campus, the dean will be practicing rolling his Rs and enunciating names dozens of letters long.

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae