Choosing a baby name can fill some parents with dread.
While some parents will have decided on their baby’s name months before the little one arrives, others will still try to come up with something they both like at the eleventh hour. Unfortunately, if you’re not completely set on the name you want to use by the time your baby is born, you may choose something that you later come to have second thoughts about once the dust has settled.
This is the scenario one mum is worried she may find herself in. She’s due to give birth in just a couple of days via induced labour, and although she thinks she’s settled on a name, there’s one thing holding her back – the way it’s spelt. The mum wants to call her daughter Isla, but she’s worried people won’t know that the ‘S’ is silent.
In a post on Reddit, she explained: “Our first daughter’s name is Ava and we think Isla goes well for our new baby. The problem is the silent S. People say they keep wanting to call her ‘Isis’!! Or they want to pronounce the S. We want it to be pronounced like ‘Island’ where the S is silent.
“We already have a silent S in our last name that people butcher. Our last name is similar to this: Quesmal. You’d pronounce it Kwa-mal, but people say Kwes-mal. Now I’m worried about people pronouncing both silent Ss. People are saying to change the spelling to Ila or Eila, but that just looks weird to me.”
The woman said that she “thought people generally understood” how Isla should be pronounced, thanks in part to famous stars like Isla Fisher. However, now that she’s spoken to some people about the name and heard them butcher it, she’s concerned she could be “dooming” her daughter to a life of having to correct people.
Commenters on the post were also split on the moniker. While some people agreed that Isla is a popular enough name that most people know how it should be pronounced, others said that there is a chance it could cause confusion. Those latter people then argued she should consider a different name if she wants to be sure no one will ever get it wrong.
One person said: “It’s a very, very popular name in multiple countries right now. I would say most people know how to say it by now. If you won’t do Isla, I think Anna or Ella would work well with her big sister’s name. But I say go for Isla, it is a beautiful name.”
But another confessed: “I would absolutely pronounce this with the s – Eez-lah, as in island in Spanish. It simply would never occur to me to pronounce it another way, to be honest.”