Joanna Grezlikowska, a Polish woman, is waiting to give birth to a son – but she’s worried that her boy’s surname would indicate that he is a woman.

The reason behind it is that Identity Malta does not allow surname changes according to sex, leaving many with surnames which indicate a different sex to their own.

Yet, gendered surnames are common in several countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, including Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Russia.

A surname’s ending is changed to show if the person is a man or a woman. So in Poland, for example, a man’s surname ends in “–ski” and a woman’s in “–ska”.

Grezlikowska is now concerned that her son will not be able to take the surname “Grezlikowski” and will be stuck with the female version of the name.

“If my father’s surname were Grezlikowska everyone in Poland would laugh,” she said.

Tomasz Balicki, a Polish man living in Malta, had a similar experience.

Ecstatic about his new baby, he went to the public registry office to register his daughter’s name.

However, officials told him that his daughter must take his exact surname. Tomasz tried to contact the Polish embassy to get the issue resolved but failed.

Tomasz eventually managed to change his daughter’s surname to Balicka on her Polish passport, following a lengthy bureaucratic process, but her birth certificate remains unchanged.

Identity Malta also only allows letters in the Maltese and English alphabet to be written in official documents.

Registering foreign names and surnames came under the spotlight on Saturday when Times of Malta reported that a French couple was unable to register their son’s name,

Gaëtan, in the public registry because of the “ë” in his name.

Many have struggled to register their children’s name.

Complaints from around the world

Since then, others have come out expressing their frustration at the issue.

A Maltese man married to a Croatian, Michael Debono Mrđen, instituted a court case after pleas with Identity Malta officials proved fruitless.

“We already have a precedent to directly transpose names to Maltese,” Mrđen said.

“In the Maltese language, Coca-Cola does not change to ‘Ċoċa-Ċola’,” he noted.

“My Maltese passport feels fake.”

Daniëlle Duijst, from the Netherlands, said it was ridiculous that she could not keep the name that her parents had given her because of an outdated system which does not cater for different alphabets.

“If I will ever get a Maltese citizenship and they can’t even add the “ë” symbol... I wouldn’t get it probably,” she said.

Gabija Kazlauskienė, a Lithuanian living here, said she was not too bothered about the “ė” in her surname being converted to “e”.

“I am based in a country which has Maltese and English as an official language, so I wasn’t even expecting my name to have Lithuanian letters,” she said.

However, if she had to register her child, she would like to keep the original letters in the document because a name is part of someone’s cultural and personal identity, she said.

According to the 2021 census, there are 115,449 foreigners living in Malta now meaning that the number of names and surnames in foreign languages is likely to keep increasing.

Other countries, too, have strict rules towards registering baby names. 

In Denmark, parents can only choose a name from a list of 7,000. The laws also require that the name must show the gender of the child and it must not be unusual.

Similarly, in Iceland parents must choose their child’s name from a National Register of Persons.

In both cases, exceptions can be made by going through a special committee.

Identity Malta was asked if there were any plans to amend the rules but it did not reply.