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It is traditional in English and Russian to print a person's given name before their family name. However, there are some languages where that order is reversed.

When flying on an American or Russian spacecraft (or the ISS), how is a person's name printed on their nametag if they come from a culture which prints the family name first?

Inspired by this excellent question.

Chris Hadfield's bilingual name tag on a space suit

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2 Answers 2

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They use the same given-name-initial followed by full-family-name format, as seen in this picture of JAXA astronaut Norishige Kanai (Kanai is his family name):

enter image description here

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Different default orderings of names had already become an issue during the interkosmos programme.

Printing the family name last on the tags has stuck for consistency. Below is Vietnamese cosmonaut Phạm Tuân, where "Phạm" is the family name.

Despite shortening names to their given name being the custom in Vietnam (due to low family name entropy), the tag still reads "PHAM" + "ФАМ"

Soyuz 37 crew

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