Spanish naming customs

In Spain, people normally have at least two surnames. One is inherited from the father, the other from the mother. Parents usually pass on to their children the name they inherited from their father, but this is not mandatory.

The father's surname is written before the mother's surname (although there are occasional exceptions to this rule). Thus, for instance, Vicente Fox Quesada is señor Fox ("Mr. Fox" in English), not señor Quesada, and "Fox" is not his middle name.

The traditional naming conventions are now changing and reverting to historical norms where surname conventions were more fluid. The child's last name can come either from the father or from the mother, though the latter is very uncommon. This change is being driven by changes in attitude toward gender equality. Current Spanish law says that all the children in a family must have the same system of surnames: if the eldest has the mother's first surname before the father's, then the rest of the siblings must use the same order. Even before these laws, people could change the order in special cases, such as clauses of inheritances.

Spanish names

Map showing the most common surname by Spanish province of residence.

In Spanish-speaking countries, the name of the father is put before the name of the mother; these names are then known as the apellido paterno or primer apellido ("paternal surname" or "first surname") and the apellido materno or segundo apellido (maternal or second surname) respectively.

First names

First names are chosen by the parents and, within the Catholic tradition, imposed by a priest in the ceremony of baptism. In Spain the newborn inscription has to be made before administrative authorities at the Registro Civil or Civil Register. Those who do not baptise their children, simply update the latter register which is the only one binding. Unlike other cultures such as the Polynesian for which the name of the deceased may become taboo, a newborn's first name is often elected to honour a living or dead relative, usually of first or second grade. The new namesake is often distinguished by a diminutive. For example, the TV director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, son of Narciso Ibáñez Menta, is nicknamed "Chicho".

Another source of names are the nomina of Catholic saints, with their surnames often being used as first names. Hence Javier (also Francisco Javier) after Saint Francis Xavier or Borja after Saint Francis Borgia. In rural parts or for foundlings, the name of one of the saints of the day the child was born could be used resulting in people named after mostly forgotten saints' names. An extreme case is Huerta de Rey, Burgos, Spain, recorded in the Guiness book for its strange names, where the commonness of surnames prompted the local registrar to recommend the most unusual names he could find. Francoist Spain legislation used to limit the fancy of parents' choice to Christian and Classical names. Nowadays the only limit is the dignity of the newborn and so it could not be named for example "Lucifer" or similar insulting names -either for the newborn or the general populace. Similar restrictions apply for "diminutives or familiar and colloquial variants that have not been recognized in their own right or those that could cause confusion in the identification of the person or its gender" In contrast, names like Floreal or Volterina in Spain or the Plata showed the adherence of the parents to anarchism.

María

Regarding forenames, for religious (Christianity) reasons, in a custom that is in some decline but by no means a thing of the past, girls were commonly named after Mary, mother of Jesus (the Virgin Mary), with the addition of the name of one of her shrines, a geographical location where someone had a vision of her, or a religious concept. To avoid confusion, a woman omits the "Mary of the..." part of her name and uses only the last, except on official documents and very formal occasions. So, the real names of Ángeles, Pilar and Luz (literally Angels, Pillar and Light) are often María de los Ángeles, María del Pilar and María de la Luz. Each of these is considered a single (composed) name. A girl might be named simply María, however.

María can be part of a male name if prefixed by a masculine one: for example, José María Aznar. Conversely, a girl could be named María José (José referring to Saint Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary). Other usages are possible, like José del Pilar, who could be called either José or Pilar. but this usage for male names has fallen out of use.

The name María is commonly abbreviated M^a.

Number of names

Spanish official records at the Registro Civil keep at most two forenames and two surnames per person. However, people can be baptized with more than two forenames, but this is mostly restricted to royalty and nobility.

People can also keep track of more than two surnames. This is most frequent in the Spanish Basque Country. For example, the founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, demanded several Basque surnames from his followers to certify that there was no admixture of Spanish or other foreigners in their ancestry.

The particle "de"

In Latin American countries, when a woman marries, she may choose to drop her own maternal surname and adopt her husband's paternal surname, with "de" ("of") inserted between. Thus if Ángela López Sáenz marries Tomás Portillo Blanco, she may style herself Ángela López de Portillo. This convention, however, is more a social styling than an official renaming such as takes place in English-speaking countries: on official documents, she will still be identified by her two maiden surnames. In many areas, however, this tradition is now seen as an antiquated form of discrimination against women (the de can be read as implying ownership) and is consequently on the decline. A more formal version is Ángela López, Sra. de Portillo ("Sra." is an abbreviation for señora: "Mrs.", "wife"). In Spain, a woman does not ever change her official surnames when she marries. An example of the uncertainty of this usage is in Don Quixote 2, V where Teresa Panza reminds that she should be properly called by her father's surname.

Transmission of surnames

If, as is very common in Spanish-speaking families, Ángela López and Tomás Portillo choose to perpetuate their forenames into the next generation, their children would be Tomás Portillo López and Ángela Portillo López.

The order rule means that the surnames of the female branch get lost as generations pass. If the female surname is especially prestigious or the combination is improper, the order may be altered. While Spain has recently introduced legal provisions to allow parents to freely decide the order of surnames, the overwhelming majority of Spaniards continue to follow the traditional pattern of father's first and mother's second.

It should be noted, however, that historically the transmission of paternal name to offspring was not the convention. Prior to the mid-1700s, in many Spanish speaking countries, children were given the maternal surname and in some occasions even that of a grandparent shared by neither of the child's parents due to prestige or land inheritance. The paternal-maternal combination and name order is a phenomenon that developed only in the last two hundred years.

As is still the case with Catalan names, in Spanish names the option exists to connect the two surnames by means of y ("and"): one well known example of this is José Ortega y Gasset. Thus, Tomás could choose to style himself Tomás Portillo y Blanco, albeit at the risk, in most of the contemporary world, of appearing affected or self-consciously following a slightly antiquated use. This use of y though remains common practice in the Philippines, where it is used, amongst other things, in keeping criminal records.

The prevalence of this custom of using two surnames varies. For example, Argentina is a Spanish-speaking country, but most Argentinians' identity is recorded at birth with only their paternal surname. Thus, one would only occasionally hear Jorge Luis Borges referred to as "Borges Acevedo", although a native Spanish speaker would certainly understand that usage. On the other hand, in some countries, such as Honduras, two surnames are required to be recorded on the birth certificate. This can cause difficulties in cases where the father's identity is unknown, or for immigrants who only have one surname.

In Spain, if the father is either unknown or does not want to recognize his child, then the newborn will take both surnames of the mother. Thus, if María López Martínez has a child by an unknown father, and she wants to name her son José, he will be called José López Martínez. Because this could lead to confusion, as that name could coincide with one of the mother's siblings, the surnames could be reversed and the child could be named José Martínez López.

Often, one specifies for brevity only one of the two surnames, usually the one inherited from one's father. Thus, if one were to shorten the name of Gabriel García Márquez, it should be "García", not "Márquez" (although in his case it is more likely to be his nickname "Gabo"). Occasionally, a person with a common paternal surname and an uncommon maternal surname becomes widely known by the maternal surname, as with the artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso, best known simply as "Picasso", or the poet Federico García Lorca, often known simply as "Lorca", or even the Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, best known as "Zapatero". Conversely, Eduardo Hughes Galeano is known as "Galeano" because his paternal surname is completely foreign to Spanish. In his childhood he occasionally signed as "Eduardo Gius" as an approximate pronunciation of "Hughes".

Not every surname is a single word. A particularly felicitious or renowned combination of paternal and maternal surnames may propagate to the following generation as a double-barrelled paternal surname, especially when the paternal surname alone would be considered "undistinguished". This was the case with former Mexican President José López Portillo, whose mother was a "Pacheco" and whose full style was "José López Portillo y Pacheco". Other double-barreled surnames derive from church names, as "San José". When a person has one of these double-barreled surnames, it is more common to use the 'y' between the paternal and maternal component parts.

Castile and Alava regions

It was also common for surnames originating from Castile and Álava to have the form "[patronymic] de [placename]". Hence for José Ignacio López de Arriortúa, "López de Arriortúa" is just one surname. This can cause confusion as both "López" and "de Arriortúa" can be found as single surnames. In Spain, unlike in neighboring France, the prefix "de" (meaning "of") on a surname does not typically indicate noble origin. It may be introduced just to mark a surname that can be misunderstood as a forename. Thus, Luis de Miguel Pérez marks that his forename is just Luis, not Luis Miguel. In short forms, the de may be included (Hernando de Soto is known as "de Soto") or not (Felipe de Borbón is a "Borbón", not a "de Borbón").

The particle "y"

Beginning in the 16th century, the Spanish custom of separating the two surnames with the copulative conjunction "y" (meaning "and") arose. Examples of this custom include names such as Luis de Góngora y Argote (16th and 17th century Andalusian writer), Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (18th and 19th century Aragonese painter) and José Ortega y Gasset (Madrilenian philosopher and essayist of the 20th century). The convention was used by Latin American clergymen, for example, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez in El Salvador. This use gained legal sanction with the Ley de Registro Civil in 1870, which required birth certificates to indicate the two surnames joined with the particle "y". In this fashion, the birth certificates of Spanish politicians Felipe González Márquez and José María Aznar López appeared as “Felipe González y Márquez" and "José María Aznar y López". However it is less frequent than its Catalan version.

The particle "y" is often found useful in avoiding confusion when the first (paternal) surname is of a type that could also be a forename. For example, if the physiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal had not used it, it might have appeared that he had the double-barreled forename Santiago Ramón and that Cajal was the only surname he used. Other examples of this use include the jurist Francisco Tomás y Valiente and the churchman Vicente Enrique y Tarancón. Examples of confusion when "y" is not used in such a case are the football (soccer) player Martín Vázquez, whose full name is Rafael Martín Vázquez but who is believed by many fans to have Martín as his forename, and the linguist Fernando Lázaro Carreter, who was sometimes addressed (to his annoyance) as Don Lázaro.

In the case that the second surname starts with I (or vowel Y or Hi), the particle becomes e, following Spanish rules of euphony, as in Eduardo Dato e Iradier.

'Son of' and 'ez'

Although the use of double surnames renders the matter far less common than in the English-speaking world, a man who has the identical name to his father may suffix his name with "(h)" (standing for "hijo", meaning "son"), analogously to the English language "Jr.".

In Spanish, most surnames ending in "-ez" originated as patronymics. Thus "López" originally meant "son of Lope", "Fernández" meant "son of Fernando", etc. Other common examples of this are "Hernández" (from Hernando, a variant of "Ferdinand" / "Fernando"), "Rodríguez" (from "Rodrigo"), "Sánchez" (from "Sancho"), "Martínez" (from "Martín"), and "Álvarez" (from "Álvaro"). Not all last names in -ez have this origin, however. Because the Spanish letter "z" is pronounced identically to the letter "s" in parts of Andalusia and in all of Spanish America (or about 9/10 of the Spanish-speaking world), one finds Spanish America spellings such as "Chávez" (e.g. Hugo Chávez), "Cortez" (e.g. Alberto Cortez) and Valdez, which are not patronymics and which traditionally were (and in Spain still are) always spelled "Chaves" (e.g. Manuel Chaves), "Cortés" (e.g. "Hernán Cortés") and Valdés. The new spellings were no doubt created by analogy with the large number of last names in -ez.

After the recognition of co-official languages in Spain, the law allowed the translation or respelling of names to the official languages.

Foundlings

Foundlings presented a problem to registrars. Often they were named after the saint of the day they were found or the patron saint of the town. For surnames, they received Expósito ("Foundling"), which marked them and their descendents as people without pedigree, or the more compassionate usage of choosing one among those most common among the population. In 1921, Spanish law allowed that the paperwork for changing the surname Expósito was cost-free[1].

Spanish surnames among Filipinos

On November 21, 1849 the Spanish administration of the Philippines, under the authority of Governor General Narciso Clavería, decreed a systematic distribution of family names and the implementation of the Spanish naming system for the use of the natives.

With the Clavería decree the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos ("Alphabetical Catalogue of Surnames") was produced. It was a collection of surnames mostly from Spain, though many were also native Filipino words of flora and fauna, and Hispanicized Chinese numerals; which is why so many Spanish-sounding surnames found among Filipino cannot be found among the peoples of the Hispanic world, as many are merely Hispanic in sound.

Surnames of Spanish nobility, as well as surnames belonging to the Spanish colonial administrators in the Philippines (which had acquired connotation of prestige in the archipelago) were explicitly prohibited.

The colonial authorities implemented this decree mainly because too many early Christianized Filipinos named themselves after religious instruments and saints. Apparently, Christianization had worked much too well in that there were soon too many people surnamed "de los Santos", "de la Cruz", "del Rosario", "Bautista", etc. This caused consternation among the Spanish authorities, as it added difficulty to administration efforts.

Another custom deemed unacceptable by the Spanish, was that Filipino siblings took different last names, as they always had done before the Spaniards. All these "problems" resulted in a less efficient system of collecting taxes.

Because of the mass implementation of Spanish surnames and the Iberian naming system in the Philippines, among Filipinos a Spanish surname does not necessarily indicate Spanish ancestry. Of the Philippine population, only around 3.6% is composed of Spanish-mestizos (those of mixed Filipino and Spanish ancestry).

See also: Hispanic culture in the Philippines.

Other languages in Spain

Speakers of other languages in Spain (Catalan, Basque, Galician, Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, Aranese) whose names had been rendered as Spanish equivalents (often due to the language politics of the Franco era) and who now wish to return to their vernacular name, enjoy a simplified name-change procedure in their respective autonomous community.

Catalan names

• Catalan has very similar conventions to Spanish, except that a person's two surnames are usually separated by "i" ("and"). A real-world example would be the ex-president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Pasqual Maragall i Mira.

"Mohamed"

As the map above shows, Mohamed is a very frequent surname in Ceuta (10,410 out of the people born in Ceuta) and Melilla (7,982), the Spanish exclaves in North Africa. "Mohamed" is one of the Spanish spellings used by Spanish-speaking Muslims for the name of their prophet Muhammad. As such, it is frequent as part of a male Arabic name. However, when Spanish Christian officials required the bearers of an Arabic name to register, they simply took the first name as the given name and the following ones as surnames. Hence, many Muslim Ceutans and Melillans share surnames while not having a common ancestry. To further confuse the issue, Mohamed is the most popular first name for newborn males, so it would not be unusual to have a Mohamed Mohamed Mohamed.

See also

• Hypocoristics for Spanish names
• List of personal naming conventions (for other languages)
• Name for general coverage of the topic
• Portuguese names

External links

• Hispanic Heraldry (in Spanish) – Information about Hispanic surnames.
• Catalan Society of Heraldry (in Catalan) – Information about Catalan surnames.
• Baby names meanings – An extensive resource of Spanish given names and their meanings.
• Territorial distribution of surnames (Data from the Register on 1 January 2006) and several Excel tables about name and surname distribution by age and province, from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spain).