No One Ever Said My Name Right. Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić Fixed That.

New York Times

7 days ago

There was a time when I regularly guided people to pronounce my surname like that of David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam. The worst part wasn't pinning my identity to a serial killer but that our names in fact sound nothing alike, making the whole effort doubly pitiful. Berkowitz, being a person of notoriety, just provided a useful shortcut. He spared me from needing to explain the Polish rules of Bahl-TZEH-veech — the 'C' and 'W' reading as 'Z' and 'V,' the stress on the penultimate syllable, the final digraph possessing the gritty 'ch-' of 'churn' and not the soft one of 'cheese,' an exquisitely subtle distinction most English speakers may not even recognize.
I have never gone out of my way to teach people around me how to properly say my name or to correct them when they butcher it; the task always struck me as Sisyphean. So a little while ago, I was startled when a bookseller in Toronto named Kyle got it right on the first try. I thanked him. But what could explain his flawless delivery? As my partner and I walked home debating the question, an epiphany came my way: 'Kyle said he was a huge basketball fan!'
North America's National Basketball Association has recently become unprecedentedly international. The league's efforts to expand its brand began in the mid-1980s through broadcasting and merchandise deals (I lived in Europe as a child and distinctly remember N.B.A. team logos being the hot items to stick on school binders), and then, after it sent its best players to the Olympics in 1992 and opened basketball academies around the world, the fruits of this globalization slingshotted back into its home country. Today many of the N.B.A.'s top players were not born here. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama, All-Stars hailing from Greece and France with Nigerian and Congolese backgrounds, have names that challenge English-language conventions of which letters should appear where. Eastern European draftees include the Serbian three-time M.V.P. Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić, from Slovenia, whose trade to the Los Angeles Lakers was front-page news.
More and more these days watching a basketball game, I hear parts and variations of my 'unpronounceable' Slavic appendage easily spoken. All those unwieldy S's, J's and C's, the peculiar graphemes, the tongue-twisty polysyllables from the region where I was born, are enthusiastically and correctly shouted by announcers on prime-time TV: 'Dončić, Dončić, Dončić,' ending in 'chich,' not 'sick'; 'Jokić, Jokić, Jokić,' pronounced 'YO-kitsch,' not 'Joe-kick.' When sportscasters call out Nikola Vučević of the Chicago Bulls, I feel myself praised by his name: I launched the alley-oop, it sounds like; I drew an offensive foul. All the while, Spike Lee and Timothée Chalamet sit watching, courtside. If asked, they could probably say 'Balcewicz' the right way.
The basketball announcers have taught — and millions of ears have heard. Jokić and his '-ch' phoneme is a household name, a lesson already absorbed. My stress about Zoom-meeting hellos or public introductions on stages has been massively mitigated. There is no longer a need to mumble my name or hedge it with false models of pronunciation when it's so close to the name of today's Michael Jordan. Seeing (or hearing) myself in this fanatically beloved activity also makes me feel something I never did growing up: accepted, even popular or kind of cool.
I, like many with non-English names, had felt doomed to a lesser identity than my peers. People with unfamiliar or difficult-to-pronounce names are often judged as less capable, studies say; our achievements and applications are more likely to be passed over. Repercussions are doubly harsh for people of color or those with strong accents. But pop culture has been slowly shifting the currents. In a nation whose defining metaphor is a melting pot, it has taken a comically long time for diverse names to bubble up and not be shortened, anglicized or outright changed to be more palatable to the English tongue. I cheer for famous 'unpronounceable' comrades like Kumail Nanjiani, Ego Nwodim or Lupita Nyong'o, whose names when gushed by 'Saturday Night Live' announcers and scores of admiring fans give me a therapeutic sense of peace.
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