Germans sensitive to names that might get young children teased

In a book-lined room on the sixth floor of an office block in west Germany, Dr Lutz Kuntzsch gave a mother the bad news. "I'm sorry," he told the woman from Berlin, "but you may not name your son Boy [Junge]." It is a noun, not a name, he explained, and for that reason he was unable to give her an Empfehlung (recommendation) to give to the local register office. The boy could not legally be christened Boy. The woman had phoned a helpline run by the Society for German Language, an independent linguistic advisory service which aims both to nurture the German language and help people use it properly. One of its jobs is to work with register offices to ensure that children are not saddled with daft names.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin could not have called their daughter Apple in Germany, said Kuntzsch, a linguist who leads the society's name police in Wiesbaden, Hesse. "Apfel?" he tutted. "No. That wouldn't work here. What if the child was fat like an apple? Think of how they would be teased." Equally, he concluded, Jamie Oliver would have to go back to the drawing board with his brood's names. Daisy Boo and Buddy Bear would not wash. Kuntzsch must consider three things when advising parents on naming their offspring. "First, and most important, we consider the welfare of the child. Could a name harm them in any way or open them up to abuse? Second, is the name actually a name? Thirdly, the name must indicate the sex of the child."



On the last point, parents who wanted to call their daughter Alex, say, would be allowed to do so only if they teamed it with a transparently female middle name, such as Stephanie. Three thousand people phoned the helpline last year to ask for name-related advice. It's a pay service: €1.86 (£1.61) per minute for the call, and €20 for the official name advisory service. "Often people are having problems registering a name because it is foreign, or isn't clearly a male or female name," said Kuntzsch, "but sometimes people just can't decide on a name, so they say to us, 'Can you give me a list of all acceptable girls' names beginning with P, but not with the second letter A' and so on."

He enjoys the intellectual challenge of deciding on a name's legitimacy. "The other day we had someone call up wanting to call their child Legian," he said. "Legian? What's Legian, we said, and it turns out Legian is the name of a hotel on an island near Bali which was special for the couple – we didn't ask why. Now the problem was that Legian sounds like Leguan [which is German for Iguana]. Would that make life difficult for the child? In the end, we let it pass." Last year, the society allowed quite a few unusual names through, including Napoleon, Kix and Nox. Names that failed to pass the test included Pfefferminza (peppermint) and Puppe (doll), along with Berlin, Napoli and TomTom. Interestingly, Adolf is not banned, although it is very unusual these days.