Bubulle's weblog

I recently tried to improve my way to interact with people by mail, in my free software work. Particularly, my intent is to be "better" in using other people names and specific politeness rules.

As many of my readers may guess, being involved in internationalization means interacting with people of different cultures.

And, when it comes at names, this is just a nightmare..:-)

Most so-called "westerners" (western of what, by the way?) are used to the common tradition we share to use people's "first" name....at first...followed by what is most often the "family" name (the one we usually get from our parents).

As a consequence, it is fairly easy for me to guess that, interacting with someone named "Barack Obama", I can use "Dear Barack" if I'm in position to use his first name and "Mr Obama" if I need to show some respect|distance|whatever.

Also, as most "western" names are quite familiar in my ears (international culture, blah blah), I can easily guess what is a first name and what is a family name (though, here, "Barack" is probably not the best example). Gender may become a little bit trickier in several cases, but, thankfully, in English, "Dear" does not change with gender (but the third person does whic sometimes leads to problems).

The problem arises when interacting with many other culturally different people such as my friends in Japan, China, India, Africa, etc. Here, dammit, the habits might vary a lot and things get harder.

Should I call my friend "Kenshi Muto" as "Dear Kenshi", "Kenshi-san", "Muto-san" or whatever? From my readings, I see that most Japanese people do put their family name at first. So, I should then call him "Dear Muto" if I'm very close to him (oh, maybe it's 'her', by the way, who knows?)...or maybe "Kenshi-sensei" because he (oh...or she) is a respected figure in the Japanese FLOSS community...or whatever. Damn!

Thankfully, I know Kenshi for years, we're good friends and I know that he's using the "western" way to write his name. I also know he's a man : after 5 or 6 Debconfs, you know everything about people!

But, of course, it becomes harder when it comes at people I never had contacts before.....and I don't want to appear as impolite, or silly so, then we jump into my daily "nightmare". Using Wikipedia for hints about Chinese, Indian (the many ones) or even Icelandic or Indigenous peoples of the Americas helps a lot, still. I can only encourage my various friends in free software to do the same. We probably all deeply appreciate when someone shows some knowledge of our culture or at least tries to do his|her best to understand our culture. That is probably also part of the mutual enrichment we get in our free software activities.

As a tribute for this, I now write my own name as "Christian PERRIER" in my email headers, so that people have a slightly better clue that "Perrier" is my family name and that someone who wants to be familiar with me should call me "Dear Christian".

I can probably ncourage my friends all around the world to do the same. For once, using capitals is not about 'shouting' but more about helping other people to figure things out.

Next blog writing about the interesting challenge we all face in free software meetings and conferences: shake hands, kiss, hug or just wave? :-)