Spanish naming customs

Since 2013, if the parents of a child were unable to agree on the order of surnames, an official would decide which is to come first,[8][9][10] with the paternal name being the default option.

However, this legislation only applies to Spanish citizens; people of other nationalities are issued the surname indicated by the laws of their original country.

The same occurs with another former Spanish Socialist leader, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, with the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca, and with the painter Pablo Ruiz Picasso.

Although the first part of a composite forename generally reflects the gender of the child, the second personal name need not (e.g. José María Aznar).

In daily life, such women omit the "Mary of the ..." nominal prefix, and use the suffix portion of their composite names as their public, rather than legal, identity.

Until the 1960s, it was customary to baptize children with three forenames: the first was the main and the only one used by the child; if parents agreed, one of the other two was the name of the day's saint.

Spanish naming customs include the orthographic option of conjoining the surnames with the conjunction particle y, or e before a name starting with 'I', 'Hi' or 'Y', (both meaning "and") (e.g., José Ortega y Gasset, Tomás Portillo y Blanco, or Eduardo Dato e Iradier), following an antiquated aristocratic usage.

Some examples include the artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso, the poet Federico García Lorca, and the politician José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

With a similar effect, the foreign paternal surname of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Hughes Galeano (his father was British) is usually omitted.

(As a boy, however, he occasionally signed his name as Eduardo Gius, using a Hispanicized approximation of the English pronunciation of "Hughes".)

Where Basque and Romance cultures have linguistically long coexisted, the surnames denote the father's name and the (family) house or town/village.

To a lesser extent, this pattern has been also present in Castile, where Basque-Castilian bilingualism was common in northern and eastern areas up to the 13th century.

This differs from another practice established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which de could be applied to one's own name as a way of denoting the bearer's noble heritage, to avoid the misperception that he or she was either a Jew or a Moor.

In the sixteenth century,[citation needed] the Spanish adopted the copulative conjunction y ("and") to distinguish a person's surnames; thus the Andalusian Baroque writer Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627), the Aragonese painter Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the Andalusian artist Pablo Diego Ruiz y Picasso (1881–1973), and the Madrilenian liberal philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955).

In Hispanic America, this spelling convention was common among clergymen (e.g. Salvadoran Bishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez), and sanctioned by the Ley de Registro Civil (Civil Registry Law) of 1870, which required birth certificates to indicate the paternal and maternal surnames conjoined with y – thus, Felipe González y Márquez and José María Aznar y López are the respective legal names of the Spanish politicians Felipe González Márquez and José María Aznar López; however, unlike in Catalan, this usage is infrequent in Spanish.

In the Philippines, y and its associated usages are retained only in formal state documents such as police records, but is otherwise dropped in favour of a more American-influenced naming order.

The conjunction y avoids denominational confusion when the paternal surname might appear to be a (first) name: without it, the physiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal might appear to be named Santiago Ramón (composite) and surnamed Cajal, likewise the jurist Francisco Tomás y Valiente, and the cleric Vicente Enrique y Tarancón.

Due to the letters z and s being pronounced alike in Latin American dialects of Spanish, many non-patronymic surnames with an -es have come to be written with an -ez.

A number of the most common surnames with the patronymic suffix -ez: Anonymous abandoned children were a problem for civil registrars to name.

Nameless children were sometimes given the surname Expósito/Expósita (from Latin exposĭtus, "exposed", meaning "abandoned child"), which marked them, and their descendants,[32] as of a low caste or social class.

Many Spanish names can be shortened into hypocoristic, affectionate "child-talk" forms using a diminutive suffix, especially -ito and -cito (masculine) and -ita and -cita (feminine).

The usages vary by country and region; these are some usual names and their nicknames: The official recognition of Spain's other written languages – Catalan, Basque, and Galician – legally allowed the autonomous communities to re-establish their vernacular social identity, including the legal use of personal names in the local languages and written traditions; these had been banned since 1938.

Moreover, some originally Basque names, such as Xabier and Eneko (English "Xavier" and "Inigo"), have been transliterated into Spanish (Javier and Íñigo).

Recently, Basque names without a direct equivalent in other languages have become popular, e.g. Aitor (a legendary patriarch), Hodei ("cloud"), Iker ("to investigate"), and Amaia ("the end").

The traditional names Peru (from Spanish "Pedro"), Pello or Piarres (from French "Pierre"), all meaning "Peter", became Kepa from Aramaic כיפא (Kepha).

He believed that the suffix -[n]e was inherently feminine, and new names like Nekane ("pain"+ne, "Dolores") or Garbiñe ("clean"+ne, "Immaculate [Conception]") are frequent among Basque females.

For example, the longest surname recorded in Spain is the compound Basque name Burionagonatotoricagageazcoechea,[38] formed by Buriona+ Gonatar + Totorika + Beazcoetxea.

For example, the former president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) is formally called El Molt Honorable Senyor Pere Aragonès i Garcia.

Just like elsewhere, many surnames were also generated from jobs or professions (Carpinteiro 'carpenter', Cabaleiro 'Knight', Ferreiro 'Smith', Besteiro 'Crossbowman'), physical characteristics (Gago 'Twangy', Tato 'Stutterer', Couceiro 'Tall and thin', Bugallo 'fat', Pardo 'Swarthy'), or origin of the person (Franco and Francés 'French', Portugués 'Portuguese').

Common suffixes include masculine -iño, -ito (as in Sito, from Luisito), -echo (Tonecho, from Antonecho) and -uco (Farruco, from Francisco); and feminine -iña, -ucha/uxa (Maruxa, Carmucha, from Maria and Carme), -uca (Beluca, from Isabeluca), and -ela (Mela, from Carmela).