The unusual baby name that a French court banned a couple from using
A French couple have their baby name banned after a court ruled they could not use the moniker Fañch that they’d chosen for their baby boy.
The court in Quimper, north west France ruled that the new parents would not be able to use the character ñ (called a tilde) in their baby’s name.
Instead Jean-Christophe Bernard and his wife were told that they would have to find an alternative.
“The principle according to which babies’ names are chosen by their mothers and fathers must have limits when it comes to using a spelling which includes a character unrecognised by the French language,” the court ruled, according to the Guardian.
Google dictionary describes the character as an accent (~) placed over Spanish n when pronounced ny (as in señor) or Portuguese a or o when nasalised (as in São Paulo).
Reports suggest the baby, who was born in May, already has an identity card and passport with the tilde on it.
The boy’s father, Jean-Christophe Bernard, has vowed to keep fighting the courts to get the ruling overturned. “He will have his tilde, that’s for sure,” he told the Guardian.
This isn’t the first time a court has deemed a baby name illegal.
Back in 2015 a court in Valenciennes, France, decided that a couple would not be allowed to name their daughter ‘Nutella’.
The judge decided that it wouldn’t be in the child’s best interest to be named after a chocolate spread.
“The name ‘Nutella’ given to the child is the trade name of a spread,” the court’s decision read, according to a translation.
“And it is contrary to the child’s interest to be wearing a name like that can only lead to teasing or disparaging thoughts (sic).”
And in April last year a Welsh mother was banned by a high court from calling her baby twin daughter Cyanide (her brother was named Preacher).
The woman argued that the name had “positive connotations as the poison that ended the life of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader”.
She also argued that she had the right to name her own children. However, Justice Eleanor King ruled that the name could cause emotional harm to the child in the future.
“It is hard to see how…the twin girl could regard being named after this deadly poison as other than a complete rejection of her by her birth mother,” she said.
Meanwhile, though not officially banned, grandparents have been letting their offspring know that their choices of baby names really aren’t floating their boat.
According to a new survey by Mumsnet, choosing the likes of Charlotte, Jack and Lindsay could cause a massive family argument with some grandparents admitting to never speaking to their family members ever again and others simply refusing to call their grandchild by his/her given name.
