Why childhood nicknames matter more than we think

In line with the season of reflections, as 2025 was drawing to a close, I sat down to write a letter to myself. But I got stuck almost immediately after “Dear” because I wasn’t sure how to address myself.

Growing up, I think many of us would have instinctively reached for our nickname in that moment. The ghar ka naam in Hindi, daak naam in Bangla, the sobriquet or the pet name that existed before we learnt how to introduce ourselves. More people in our inner world knew us by that name then. Your official name belonged to the outside world: report cards, roll calls, formal introductions.

As you grow older—especially if you move away from the family you grew up with—the number of people who still use that name dwindles in comparison to the official name. New terms of endearment appear. Friends invent fresh variants by suffixing vowels to shortened names—mine has picked up a “u”, an “i”, even a rare “ie”. Colleagues abbreviate our names for convenience.

A nickname, it got me thinking, is not just what someone calls you. It’s how they see you, and how you learn to see yourself around them.

While I couldn’t find a peer-reviewed study on what happens when we lose the connection with names that shaped our earliest sense of self, sociolinguistic research has long established the role of nicknames in shaping our sense of identity.

A 2024 study published in MDPI, a Swiss open-access science journal, examined street children in south-western Nigeria and found that “nicknaming (themselves and peers) served as a deliberate strategy for identity framing and resilience, helping children construct a sense of self under oppressive circumstances.”

Another 2024 report, this one from Harvard Business Review, explored workplace nicknames and found their effects were asymmetrical. When employees nickname their supervisors, referred to as upward nicknaming, the subordinates tend to feel more psychologically safe and respected. But in downward nicknaming, where supervisors nickname a subordinate without their consent, the employee’s well-being suffers.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Nikhil Ganguli spends years rejecting his pet name, Gogol, in favour of his “good name”. But after his father’s death, he begins to understand the weight that name carries, how it was tied to his father’s survival. In the end, the name Gogol is no longer a burden for him, it becomes a bridge to his father’s memory.

When fewer people call us by our childhood names, do we lose a portal to our younger selves? Psychology often talks about staying connected to the “inner child”, the self that existed before we learned how to perform. Isn’t our childhood nickname, in some ways, the voice code to activate that version of ourselves?childhood

So, when I hesitate over how to address myself in a letter, I’m grappling with more than a salutation. I’m asking who I believe I am when I speak to myself. Am I Gogol or Nikhil? And somewhere in that confusion sits a quiet fear: have I lost a part of my identity that only my childhood nickname knew how to call into being?