24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas explains how Filipino naming works: people take their father's surname as their last name and mother's maiden name as their middle name, with parents choosing one or more given names. Filipinos often pick American-style or creative first names like Dianni Rose Malvar Singson and Lord Jason.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 161, the naming system in the Philippines. So this is kind of going to be a fun, a fun episode. How people get their names in the Philippines is different than in the US and so hopefully some of you will remember this picture if you're watching this on YouTube. Hopefully we can show this. It's a picture of when my kids were little. I have three kids in this picture. My, my two kids that I had to watch. When my wife went on strict bed rest for this third baby. That is really the impetus for me living the lifestyle that I do was her strict bed rest and having two kids that I had to take care of during this pregnancy and then the baby coming and taking care of all three of them for a couple months because my wife struggled with postpartum depression. And it cut my work time down to basically zero, less than the four hour work week. And I never went back because I started experimenting with how good these people in the Philippines could actually be. And turned out, oh, they're amazing. I just didn't know that. So these kids are named Austin, Adeline and Bailey. And we call Austin Austin, we call Bailey Bailey, we call Adeline Addie, and we gave them middle names and that's how we do it in the US Bailey. Hopefully you can see this picture too. Bailey's 15 now and healthy and amazing and just like life is so good. So here's another picture of my, the two guys that were working for me at that time when all of this went down with my wife in the pregnancy. Their names are Joven and Paul. Joven still works for me, Paul does not. But that is 2007. And so since then I have seen a lot of names. And I'm just going to read to you some names from the Philippines. These aren't unusual names, they're just names. So, and I have, I got a list here, just names. So Diani, Rose, Malvar Singson, Ariel Esquivel, Urbina. Now, let me, let me, I'm gonna cut this short a little bit. So in the US the way we get our names is straightforward. You get your last name from your parents, whatever their last name is, from your mom, if it's a single mother. And then you give them however many names you want to give them. The, the first, usually, typically it's a first and a middle name, but sometimes there's a first and two middle names. The US in the Philippines, not how it works. So you get your last name from your dad, you get your middle name from your mother. Your mother's maiden name is your middle name. And then the parents get to choose the first name. And so sometimes they'll choose multiple first names. And that's why we have Diana Rose Malvar Singson. So in this case, Singson is her parents name, Malvar is her mother's maiden name. And then her first name is Dianni Rose or other names like Don William, Rosalpan, Fabela. And these are names that my team gave to me. Dorothea May, Pakateng, Zaldariaga, Lord Jason, Campos Jose. Or like on my team we have a Nino Paulo. And so like Nino Paulo is like Child Paulo. That's what Nino means. So for people that want to trace their lineage, this is really amazing. Like you know your mother's maiden name and your and your father's name. It also leads to a bunch of interesting names. People want to give unique names like Lord Jason as a first name or, or this. There's this baby born in 2021 that has three first names and no vowels in it. And it's like 30 characters of name. I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. And then you get very, very like American names included as first names. And I don't really understand the culture behind that, but I know it, I know it is a. There's some culture of having an American name of things. So naming is different in the Philippines than in the US and it's kind of a cool part of their culture.
