My passport has two of my names in both Ukrainian Cyrillic and Latinized form, neither of which is my full legal name per Ukrainian law. My id however has a legal full name in Cyrillic, but not in Latin. To make matters worse, the same set of Cyrillic characters can be represented by different Latin characters and it's somewhat up to me to decide how it's spelled when the document is issued. Since I can have more then one passport at the same time, the names in Latin don't even have to match.
Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.
In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.
add:
To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.
I can also tell you that the passport office doesn't check anything very well, at least in the US, as my name on my passport doesn't actually match the name on my birth cert or SSN paperwork. I guess I mis-wrote it when I filled it out originally, but now I have to deal with how to get it fixed. For renewals, they only have a "my name changed" field, not a "you messed it up", so I've been ineffective at correcting the issue for years now.
In Ireland, it’s not entirely rare to use different forms of one’s name in Irish and English.
For example, in English our president would be called “ Michael Daniel Higgins”, but in Irish “Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn”, and while there’s obviously a correspondence between them, they are pronounced quite differently.
It’s possible to change the version of the name you use on your passport after six months of regular use (compared to two years for any other kind of name change), and in that situation both forms of your name will be listed on your passport.
What's on your passport may not be canonical. In some countries (Ireland and the UK, for instance) your name is, for practical (and generally legal!) purposes, whatever you use day to day; it wouldn't be _that_ uncommon for someone to have name X on their passport but have been going by name Y for years, and in this case name Y would probably be considered their legal name in most contexts.
I'm in that situation now, my UK passport/birth-certificate name is not the one I'm known by.
After several years of getting queried on mismatching ID, now I've moved to another country, I'm going through the process to "rename myself" - and mostly that's a matter of saying "Here's the name I've used for a long time, please make it official".
After the renaming goes through I'll be updating everything to match which will no doubt be a pain. But once it's done I'll have a much easier life.
Just as a really common anglo example, my passport has my middle name, but I will not otherwise use that name unless it's explicitly requested. Even airlines are inconsistent about this, so for most purposes I'm just Firstname Lastname.
At one point I had cards from two different banks, one with my middle name and one without.
See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.
For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.
I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.
If you obtain French citizenship you can "francify"[0] your name; you'll end up with two full canonical names. Nothing really forces you to change your original name in your original nationality.
I'm from Ireland, an English-speaking country in Western Europe. I have a name that is a typical Western name. In theory, I should be the happy path for any name system.
But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.
Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.
But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"
Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".
Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.
Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.
Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.
For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.
Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.
And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.
>People have exactly one canonical full name.
What is on your passport then?