alexryakhin / american_name

Society mostly likely expects you to, so Anglicize your name

American Name

What’s in a name? In a racialized society it could mean access to financial loans, job interviews, favorable response in academia and greater earnings. One’s name can often be used as a proxy for race, and race is a problem that will continue to exist as long as white rage exists.

Americans and Immigrants to the United States are at times faced with forsaking their identities to fit into a society where whiteness is the dominant power structure. The need to accomodate whiteness may involve changing one’s speech/accent, dress, food and name. Those with foreign sounding names, often ‘non-white’, are expected to provide nicknames or shortened versions of their names as an attempt to integrate into society.

This app uses an Double Metaphone algorithm an English phonetic algorithm and Levenshtein Distance string comparison algorithm to transform a name into its nearest sounding English counterpart (as much as is possible). I'm using the U.S. Census' publicly available dataset of the top popular ~2000 names from 2008.

Install

• compile: gcc main.c lib.c double_metaphone.c levenshtein.c -o an

Run

./an <name> <csv file where names are in first column> <sensitivity-score 0 being strongest> This outputs a list of similar names that are <= sensitivity (similarity) score.

Open Source Libraries

C version

• double metaphone
• Levenshtein

Javsacript Version

• double metaphone
• levenshtein distance