View Message

Thanks for your replies. I dunno, to me it is really weird to see a girl named Noel, because it looks so male, but that's only a matter of habit I suppose :)

---

Oh, and I didn't pay attention to Noel being pronounced differently, since in French they're both prononced the same way.

In my experience in the United States Noel is pronounced almost the same as knoll and is a guy's name, as such it is generally changed to Noelle just to make sure people understand that it is a girls name. Rene is also generally accepted as a guys name in my experience but I have met a couple of girls without the second e that girls tend to have in the US.

For Noel, at any rate, it goes with pronunciation in South Africa. I know of a woman named Noel, pronounced the male/seasonal way; but I also know a couple of Noelle women, all of whom sound like no-WELL. But if anyone here saw the name Noel Smith, they'd assume he was a he.

---

South Africans are, historically, very bad at French. The default European language (apart from English and Afrikaans) taught in our high schools used to be overwhelmingly German, not French. Now it's changing, because politically we are now open to Africa, including the Francophone countries.

---

I've got a colleague, a working-class Afrikaans woman unlikely to have studied languages at school, whose name is Rene. Just like that. (Nothing to do with Irene ... I asked! And it's pronounced like Renee.) A friend of mine has named his equally Afrikaans son Rene ... most South African Rene/Renee people are female and use the -ee spelling (which I can't do properly in this program). But there are exceptions! And it used to be quite fashionable to name girls Helene and pronounce it he-LEEN, though I haven't seen a young one for many years.

---

Hope that helps!

---

All the best

Well, according to the Social Security website at
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
the female Noel was ranked around 860 in the 1000 most popular names for newborns in the US in the 1990's.

---

The female René did not "chart", but a quick Google search with "Mrs. Rene" turns up quite a number of female Rene's.

---

I personally think that the US naming habits make most such male/female questions uninteresting, because the answer is almost always "Yes": Yes, there are male such-and-such despite one would judge this to be a female name, and vica-versa of course.

---

In the US, no name seems to be female enough to stop people to give the name to males also, the only thing one can hope for is a small number of cases :)