Maitreyi Ramakrishnan calls out people who mispronounce her name

23 July 2021, 11:52

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan corrects people who mispronounce her name

By Jazmin Duribe

"I’m asking for basic respect when I want people to say my name right, as many of us do, right?"

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has corrected people who mispronounce her name.

On Thursday (Jul 22), the Never Have I Ever actress shared a Twitter voice memo explaining the importance of pronouncing people's name's correctly.

"Names are so important, and I find that it's a big part of your identity – it personally is for me," she explained. "I love my name so, so much. And constantly I get people saying, 'Oh, you don’t even know how to say your own name right.' It’s like, 'No, no, no, I do. I do know how to say my own name right.' Because reality is, no one knows how to say someone else’s name except for the person themselves, you know?

"Like, this is my name. I’m sorry, but I get to call the shots here. There is one answer and that answer is my own. There’s no discussion for that."

READ MORE: Never Have I Ever co-creator addresses backlash over Devi and Paxton's "creepy" real-life age difference

Maitreyi then spoke about how she let mispronunciations slide when she was younger, however, she has now realised that learning how to properly pronounce her name is just "basic respect".

"So personally, when I was younger, I used to tell people, 'Yeah, you can call me My-tree like whatever, I don’t care,' because I used to think I was inconveniencing them, but I’m not," she added. "I’m asking for basic respect when I want people to say my name right, as many of us do, right? Like, we just want our names to be right. We don’t want it to be butchered, but sometimes we just, you know, accept it, which really, really sucks. And I hope you guys don’t have to go through that too often.

"But nowadays, being my great, wise, 19-year-old self, I ask people to say my name correctly and I put a lot of active effort whenever it’s like an interview, or, you know, just meeting people in general, like new people. I make sure that they say my name right."

Maitreyi then revealed that her name is actually pronounced My-tray-yee Ra-ma-krish-nin. She continued: "Not expecting people to switch up their accents on me, just asking for basic respect."

She also doubled down on her comments on Twitter. She tweeted: "yk it’s actually crazy how many people (before NHIE came out) thought I was gonna change my name to make it easier. cute."

She added: "now 'my tree' is fun and all but lets make sure we remember that names have power. pronounce peoples names the way they want it to be pronounced and put in the effort. so hey! my name is Maitreyi/my-tray-yee/."