Melting Pot Nomenclature

When someone decides to invent a fantasy land, they often give everyone exotic and strange names to help reinforce the essential foreignness. However, in some cases, the writer decides to keep things a bit more down to Earth, and so keeps the exotic names, but only uses real names.

Melting Pot Nomenclature occurs when these names come from different, disparate cultures, countries, and languages.

Note that this only applies to single fictional countries. If you have one country with French names and one with German, then it's not an example. However, a small farming village where you can meet a pair of brothers names Pierre and Gunter would be an example.

There is some Truth in Television to this, in countries that have large and diverse immigrant populations. It is particularly common in Western Hemisphere countries, in which descendants of European, Asian, and African settlers and slaves outnumber descendants of the natives, and intercultural marriage results in a huge mishmash of names across the board.

Compare Aerith and Bob, which combines real names with fictional ones in a single setting.

Examples of Melting Pot Nomenclature include:

Anime & Manga

• In Berserk, we have the Italian Renaissance-ish port of Vritanis, where the van Damion family lives ('van Damion' means 'from Damion' in Dutch, but 'Damion' doesn't sound anything like typical Dutch place names). They have kids with names like Magnifico and Farnese (Italian).
• One Piece has this sometimes. Some characters are given European-sounding names, but they're actually following Asian naming conventions. Thus Monkey D. Luffy's first name is actually Luffy, while his family name is Monkey D. Yes. His middle initial is his family name. Others are meant to be from a Western culture, but are given strange and unfitting names (Word of God says Sanji is French, but his name means "three o'clock snack" in Japanese).
• Most characters in Mai-Otome, which takes place on a far-future Lost Colony, have Japanese given names and European family names.
• The cosmopolitan, international Cyberpunk feel of MegaTokyo in Bubblegum Crisis is underlined by the wide variety of character names from a dozen or more languages. They are often mixed-and-matched, as in the case of Nene Romanova (Japanese first name, Russian surname).

Film

• Clerks gives us Dante Hicks. Word of God states that he is half-Irish, half-Italian.

Literature

• Happens in the Vorkosigan Saga with French (Pierre), Russian (Ivan, Piotr), and English (Miles) names occuring in the same family. Though this is Justified (or possibly more like Handwaved) by the multi-ethnic group that settled Barrayar. Cryoburn takes place on a planet with obvious Japanese influence, but several of the characters have a Japanese given name and Western surname, or the other way around.
• Ender's Game has this at the Battle Academy, which is full of children from around the world.
• In Havemercy, the main characters' Fantasy Counterpart Russia seems to contain a mix of French and British names with a handful of names from other languages thrown in for good measure, with no explanation for the mix or why nobody's name sounds as though it comes from the same language as the name of the country itself. The neighboring pseudo-China country, meanwhile, mixes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-sounding names—though it is an empire which has conquered a lot of territory.
• Dutch Fantasy/Sci-Fi author Tais Teng likes to do this in futuristic settings or stories taking place in particularly large cities. The worst example is his charlatan Sherlock Holmes Captain Ersatz, one of the last pure-blooded human beings in the universe; his full name is Percy d'Arezzo y Mac Shimonoseki.
• In Everworld ancient cultures survive, but often live close to each other in patterns totally different from our world. One result is a large number of Black Vikings (and Asian Vikings, etc.), including a pair of brothers named Sven and Sancho (whose mother was apparently an Aztec).

Toys

• Bionicle: In its first year (2001), the brand drew its character names, place names, and other terminology from a wide range of Polynesian languages. This led to some controversy over the use of Maori names, and in 2003 some of these original names were changed to My Nayme Is variants. But 2003 also introduced Loads and Loads of Characters in the Mata Nui Online Game II, who had Meaningful Names coming from even more diverse global languages. Examples include Nixie (English), Pelagia (Latin), Taiki (Japanese), Tehuti (Egyptian), Kalama (Hawaiian), and Pakastaa (Finnish).

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: In Daien alone, there are names like Micaiah (Hebrew), Nolan (Irish), Leonardo (Italian), Meg, Edward, Jill (English), and Izuka (Japanese).
• The English translation of Pokémon has this because the translators have an obsession with giving everyone Meaningful/Punny Names, so they'll go with whatever makes the best pun rather than the most consistency. (e.g. Bianca (Italian), Cheren (Bulgarian), Volkner (German), Cyrus (Persian), Amanita (Spanish), Rood (Dutch), Bronius (Latin), Giallo (Italian again), Ryoku (Japanese), Gorm (Gaelic), Zinzolin (French), etc.)
• Can happen in The Sims 2 with townies and NPCs (because their names are picked at random), causing names such as Abhjeet Copur.

Web Original

• This is the case in Tasakeru, where each of the eight sentient species has their own culture and naming customs.

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Water Tribes generally have vaguely Eskimo-sounding names, but there's also a couple like Yue (Chinese). Earth Kingdom has names like Bumi (Indonesian), Jet, Long Feng (Chinese), Haru, Suki (Japanese), Song (Korean), Toph (Hebrew), and Koko (French), though this is probably more justified than the rest, what with the Earth Kingdom being much bigger than any of the other nations. Fire Nation gives us names like Roku, Iroh, Mai (Japanese), Lu Ten, Ty Lee, Li, Luo (Chinese), and even a couple of Latin-derived names (Ursa, Azula).
• The Legend of Korra follows on from this. Korra is a My Nayme Is variant of Cora. The "fabulous bending brothers" are Mako (firebender, Japanese) and Bolin (earthbender, Chinese). Hiroshi Sato and his daughter Asami have Japanese names and are descended from Fire Nation colonists, which may also be the case for Shiro Shinobi. Korra's parents Tonraq and Senna have Eskimo names, as does Narook the noodle-shop owner. Tenzin is Tibetan (a Shout-Out to the Dalai Lama), as is Pema. Jinora comes from Sanskrit "Jinorasa." Ikki is Uzbek for "two." Butakha is Indonesian for "bald." Lin Bei Fong is Chinese. Saikhan is Mongol. Hasook is Korean. Tarrlok is Irish made to look Eskimo. And "Lightning Bolt" Zolt is odd—the only name close to Zolt in the real world is the Hungarian name "Zoltan." This is the result of people from all over the world coming together in Republic City.

Real Life

• Naturally, this is the case in The United States, where it is quite common for a person to have a first name deriving from a completely different language than their last name.
• Many Chinese people in English-speaking countries adopt an English given name, which may or may not be part of their legal name, but keep their real family name, leading to combinations like Donald Tsang or Josephine Ng.