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Should an ALL-CAPS word in a mixed-case name mark the family name? DUPONT Jean gives given DUPONT #659
Description
French administrative data, and many African and Francophone conventions, write the surname in capitals: Jean DUPONT, DUPONT Jean, Abɖu-Tɔyib GOMINA MUSA (CLDR blo). nameparser reads by position, so a surname-first listing reverses:
Jean DUPONT → given Jean, family DUPONT (right, by position)
DUPONT Jean → given 'DUPONT', family 'Jean'
Abɖu-Tɔyib GOMINA MUSA → middle 'GOMINA', family 'MUSA' (CLDR: family GOMINA, given incl. MUSA)
The question: is case a signal the parser should read? It's written evidence, not language detection, so it fits the positional doctrine better than most culture-specific rules.
What makes it hard:
- A name written wholly in capitals carries no signal, so the rule only applies to mixed-case input.
- All-caps words are already claimed by credentials (
John Smith MBA, and theCapsSuffixespolicy) and by acronym titles. - The capitals can mark a multi-word surname (
DE LA FONTAINE). - It would most naturally be an opt-in
Policyfield, not a default.
Activity
derek73 commentedon Oct 16, 2026
Another writing tradition with the same convention: Japanese names written in Latin script often put the surname in capitals, usually surname first:
YAMAMOTO Yukio,SATŌ Akari(examples from The Cultural Atlas, Japanese naming). Measured on master 1a4e8a1:This is the surname-first listing that the French examples above also reverse, here from an unrelated tradition. The convention spans languages, so a rule here would be reading how the name is written, not guessing its language. The macron in
SATŌis an uppercase letter, so a test like_vocab.written_as_a_name's (last cased letter) sees it correctly.