Last summer, while I was back home, my brother asked me where I came up with the nicknames for Nuno & Lana. For some reason I didn’t get around to answering him. Then a few months ago (maybe longer) my friend Sara asked me the same question in an email. My plan was to address it here. Well, I wasn’t quick enough because Jesse just asked me the same question last week. I promised him that I would give him an answer this week, so here you are.

I will start with Lana. When she was born, I spoke to her primarily in Portuguese. It wasn’t until she started to talk, in what seemed like paragraphs, that I capitulated and just spoke English with her. Really, she went from single word utterances to not shutting the h@$% up!

What happened though in those 2.5 years, was there was an infiltration of Portuguese words into her vocabulary. To this day, her favorite stuffed animals are Aõ-Aõ (that is the sound a Portuguese dog makes when it barks) and Macaco (Portuguese for Monkey). Both of these animals she named herself.

Besides being exposed to Portuguese, we also further complicated matters by giving her a gazillion nicknames. We didn’t realize how out of control we were until Nuno came along and wouldn’t remember his sister’s name. He actually was calling her Djuga-djuga for a while before we realized that that was his name for her. It just hit us all at once that we must be confusing the hell out of him. Quickly we limited the nicknames we used for her.

Monkey, is probably the name that we used most. That is who she is, our monkey. Yet, when we arrived here the name I chose to use, I think subconsciously, was Lana. Australia is lovely, but it is sterile when it comes to languages. You hear a variety of ‘Englishes’ on the street, but that’s about it. Lana is my way to infuse a little bit of Portuguese into our lives. Lana /pronounced ~ lÅ­nÅ­/ came about because it rhymes with mana (Portuguese for sister), which was another nickname we had for her.

I am admitting here that although it is a hokey country bumpkin thing to do, we called my daughter ‘sister’. And this stuck. Actually, my husband and I still call each other, “mom” & “dad”. This habit is something I inherited from Carlos. I place the blame squarely on him. But we are weak, and we can not stop this thing we do, no matter how hard we try.

Nuno, on the other hand has a name that just did not lend itself to nicknames. One day, I took his name and made it Polish by adding -newsky to it. This is something that Maria used to do to bastardize names. I can’t explain it, but it just came out of my mouth one day. Quickly I went from ___newsky to Nuno. My husband just about jumped out of his skin and insisted I NEVER call his son Nuno. Hum, that was it. My kid was nicknamed. Eventually, my husband embraced it.

It worked really well when we were in Portugal since his real name is very difficult to pronounce in Portuguese. When we left, friends of ours gave him a lovely silver chain with a letter ‘N’ charm. I realized then, that this nickname was for keeps.

Like his sister’s name, it allows me, and them, to hear Portuguese a few times a day. It reminds us of where I am from, and to a certain extent where they are from.

Note, pictures were taken in Fall of 2008 in Portugal.

Cultural clarification: After reading the post, my husband commented that his parents call each other ‘mum’ & ‘dad’. Although, technically they live in the country, they are a very elegant couple, nothing ‘bumpkin’ about either of them. In New Zealand however, people refer to one’s parents with those titles. Even when speaking to a non family member a kiwi will say, “We’re going to mum’s house.”, not “We’re going to my mum’s house. This took some getting used to. But now I roll with it. So no, I am not calling my very sophisticated in-laws country bumpkins.