Bengali Names

Structure & order

Bengali names follow Western order, given name first, surname last:

[GIVEN] [(MIDDLE)] [SURNAME]

• A middle name is common, especially among Muslims, and can be a second given element.
• A modern trend folds the household daak naam into the official full name, e.g. Saifuddin Kanchon Choudhuri (where Kanchon is the familiar middle element). (uncertain, described as a recent stylistic trend, not a rule)
• Among Bangladeshi Muslims there is no fixed scheme: many people use no inherited family name at all, so members of one family may have different "last names." Names can chain a given name with the father's name or a series of descriptors (e.g. Abdul Karim s/o Mohammed).

Given names

• Hindu given names draw on Sanskritic / Hindu vocabulary: deities, virtues, nature and cosmic concepts (with Pali contributions historically).
• Muslim given names derive predominantly from Arabic, then Persian (Farsi), with some Bengali and Pali elements, all adapted to Bengali phonology.
• Gender marking: given names are generally gender-specific (rather than marked by a single regular suffix). Female Muslim names frequently pair with the female-marking elements Begum (বেগম) or Khatun (খাতুন); for Hindu women, Debi/Devi (দেবী, "goddess") can be appended. See Gender Marking.
• The "Mohammad" prefix: Mohammad / Muhammad / Md. / MD very commonly precedes a Muslim man's name and is not itself the name used to refer to him; the following element is the true given name (e.g. Md. Rafiqul Islam → addressed as Rafiqul).

How to address someone

• Babu (বাবু), the traditional honorific suffix for an ordinary (typically Hindu) man, attached to the given name: Shubhash Basu → Shubhash-Babu.
• Moshai / Mohashoy (মশাই / মহাশয়): a more formal honorific, used with the family name.
• Saheb and Janab; used for addressing Muslim men; Babu is for men of other religions.
• Debi / Devi (দেবী): appended as an honorific for non-Muslim women.
• Kinship-term address is pervasive: -da / Dada (elder brother), -di / Didi (elder sister) are suffixed to names or used alone for respected non-relatives. (reported in general usage; treat the exact productivity as approximate)
• Bengali also encodes politeness in its second-person pronouns: apni (আপনি, honorific), tumi (তুমি, ordinary/familiar), tui (তুই, intimate/inferior). See Salutations and Address.

Pitfalls for software

• Dual-name system (the headline pitfall). Most Bengalis carry two names: the bhalo naam (ভালো নাম, "good name") used in legal/official/public contexts, and the daak naam (ডাক নাম, "call name") used only inside the family and by childhood friends. The two are frequently etymologically unrelated (Suman ↔ Bubai), and the daak naam is often deliberately private. Parsers must not assume a nickname is a phonetic reduction of the legal name. Typical daak naam: Bablu, Bubun, Khoka, Mithu (boys); Mishti, Tia, Mou, Tinni, Jhumur (girls). This custom has no close parallel elsewhere in India.
• "Mohammad / Md." is not the given name. Software that treats the first token as the first name will mis-key the very common Md. prefix; the referent name is the next element.
• Religious-attribute elements masquerade as surnames. Islam, Rahman, Uddin, Hossain in a Muslim name usually complete a compound given name, not a family line; splitting on the last token gives a false surname.
• No-surname families (Bangladesh). Do not assume siblings/parents share a last name; many Bangladeshi Muslims use no hereditary surname at all.
• Anglicized vs. native surname forms (Banerjee/Bandyopadhyay, Chatterjee/Chattopadhyay, Mukherjee/Mukhopadhyay) are the same surname, important for deduplication.
• Caste-loaded Hindu surnames. Treat caste inferences from surnames as probabilistic, not certain.
• Contrast with the neighbouring Hindi and North Indian Names system, which shares given-first order but has its own caste-surname stock and (for Hindus) astrological name selection.