Project · January 2019 · edited 6 November 2026

American Name

Anglicisation of non-white names.

Identity and being

What’s in a name? In a racialized society it could mean access to financial loans, job interviews, favorable response in academia and greater earnings. One’s name can often be used as a proxy for race, and race is a problem that will continue to exist as long as white rage exists.

Americans and immigrants to the United States are at times faced with forsaking their identities to fit into a society where whiteness is the dominant power structure. The need to accommodate whiteness may involve changing one’s speech or accent, dress, food and name. Those with foreign sounding names, often non-white, are expected to provide nicknames or shortened versions of their names as an attempt to integrate into society.

Americanize my name

Research has been done on job applicants who have been denied job interviews due to non-white sounding names. White males are more likely to get a response from university faculty than non-white applicants. The discrepancies are many but the effects are the same — marginalization of non-white communities, especially Black ones. The reasons for changing one’s name vary and can be complex. However it is often a dehumanizing and demeaning process that some people experience in one shape or another.

The demo

This runs the Double Metaphone algorithm, an English phonetic algorithm, with Levenshtein distance string comparison, to transform a name into its nearest-sounding English counterpart as far as that is possible. It uses the Social Security Administration’s publicly available dataset of the roughly 2,000 most popular names from 2008, drawn from a list of about 35,000. The cutoff popularity score for inclusion was 200; Emma, the most popular, scored 18,809.

Commentary, 2026

[Your commentary goes here.]

Code for this project, in JavaScript and C, is on GitHub. Everything runs in the browser — no name is sent anywhere.