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This is Sweden, one of the countries on the friendly northern countries side of the world.
In Sweden, you can’t name your baby Metallica, you can’t name them Elvis, you can’t name
them Ikea, and you definitely can’t name them Albin just as long as its spelled like
this.
That’s because Sweden has some of the strictest laws in the world on which names you can use.
These laws originally came around because Sweden is a monarchy.
They’ve got a king, and queen, and royal families, as monarchies do, and they don’t
want anyone to just waltz into fake nobility by changing their name.
They want the nobles to stay noble and their ordinaries to stay ordinary so nobody is allowed
to use the names of noble families unless they are part of that family.
Slight problem—there are over 28,000 nobles in Sweden.
That’s a lot of prohibited names.
Weirdly, these laws are managed by the Swedish Tax Agency.
Whenever a baby is born in Sweden, parents are required to submit a name to them for
approval.
Of course in most cases babies just take the last name of their parents, but you can technically
change last names, so, in order to prevent anyone from changing their last names to that
of a royal, this agency prevents anyone from naming their child or changing their name
to a noble name.
But they also regulate first names.
The naming law states that “First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense
or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some
obvious reason are not suitable as a first name.”
This is why they rejected this spelling of Albin.
The parents submitted this name in protest of the naming laws since they were fined 5000
krona for not submitting a name by the child’s 5th birthday and, after this spelling was
rejected, they tried again by submitting the name Albin, this time spelled like this.
This name was rejected again because of a ban on one-letter names.
But Sweden isn’t the only place where some names are illegal.
In Denmark, which is, fun fact, the only country in the world who’s name starts with “d-e-n”
and ends with “mark,” there’s a list of 15,000 male names and 18,000 female names
that are approved for use.
In order to name a child something not on this list, parents have to go through a laborious
approval process.
Iceland, one of the other countries in the jibber-jabber language area of the world,
is even more restrictive where there are only 1,700 approved male names and 1,800 approved
female names.
These Icelandic laws are even more difficult to comply with because Iceland doesn’t name
people the same way as the rest of the world.
In the traditional Icelandic naming system, there are no real last names.
If someone named Karl Daníelson has a boy named Björn, the son would not take the last
name Daníelson.
In Iceland, boys last names are typically their fathers first names plus “son” which,
surprisingly, means son, while girls last names are correspondently usually their fathers
first names plus dóttir, which means daughter.
So, that boy named Björn with a father named Karl would be named Björn Karlson.
This can create enormous difficulties especially for Icelandic nationals who have children
abroad and name them with the more traditional last-name system.
Children without proper gendered last names have regularly been denied passports in Iceland
and so, to summarize, in Iceland, Aliaksandr Alexander Aliaksandrson is a legal name but
John Smith is not.
But even the US has some restrictions on names.
Of course, Americans seem to take this whole free speech thing pretty seriously so you
don’t need to get names approved, but there are some technical limitations on which names
you can have.
There are no country-wide laws on names, but different states have different restrictions
mostly based off of how advanced their computer systems that handle name registration are.
In Alaska, for example, you can have any name you want but in New Hampshire, on the other
hand, names are capped at 100 characters because the state computers can only handle 100 character
names.
California, meanwhile, prohibits names spelled with anything but the 26 letters of the English
alphabet so Günter and Léa and José are out of luck.
Of course these people aren’t just prohibited from existing in California, but for all government
purposes their name will be switched to a version without accents.
Also out of luck would be famous mathematician Mileva Marić who I’m sure you all know
married Albert Einstein who published the Theory of Relativity, which stated that you
can’t travel faster than the speed of light, among other things, in 1905 then 113 years
later it went up as a course on brilliant.org.
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