Really. Naila Maya Shofia is just my name. Like millions of Indonesians, I don’t have a family name. My six siblings and I all have completely different names. Indonesia’s first two presidents, Soekarno and Soeharto, famously had just one name each.

So why does "Shofia" appear as my last name? Because airlines, foreign visa offices, Google Scholar, and academic journals really, really want me to have one. So I gave them one.

An administrative life of a person without a surname

History has a strange way of leaving linguistic footprints

I grew up bilingual in Javanese (Boso Jowo) and Bahasa Indonesia (the national lingua franca); English came later. My grandmother, meanwhile, speaks Javanese but not Bahasa Indonesia. She cannot read the Latin alphabet, but she is perfectly literate in Pegon—Javanese written in an Arabic-derived script. So, within two generations, my family went from Pegon to writing academic papers in English. Make of that what you will.

Javanese itself has travelled much farther than I have. Spoken by almost 70 million people, it made its way across the world to Suriname, where it is still spoken today by descendants of Javanese workers brought there under Dutch colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.