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Is okay. I'm neutral about this.

Boring, but better than Mary.

This message was edited 2/16/2024, 9:29 AM

Ok as a nn

My mother-in-law, an Afrikaans woman, died when her son was five. Her names were Bertha Maria. We wanted to give our first daughter her grandmothers' names as mns, but we couldn't warm up to Bertha and Maria didn't fit very well. So instead of Maria we used Mary: shorter, tidier and definitely English.

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For interest: MIL worked for an English company where she met my FIL. They were both perfectly bilingual in Afrikaans and English, but somehow she became BERtha instead of the Afrikaans BERRtah. DH and his sister used to visit their grandmother and when they walked to the shops with her and she met a friend, she'd always say 'Dis Bertha se kinders' (These are Bertha's children), which made them sad, but they also knew that she had probably suffered more than they had when Bertha died, so they didn't say anything.

Always liked this name. I wish it were more popular outside of Spanish and Portuguese heritage countries.

There's just something about Maria in English that's much prettier than in Spanish. Maybe it's because I don't hear it as often.
As a middle name it feels kind of like a throwaway name though.

I like it so much more than Mary. Its pretty.

I'm a Maria. I like how international it is, I dislike how common it is. In high school, I did a Polish class where, out of 12 people, three were girls called Maria, and three were girls called Julia.