About my language, Portuguese

We are very informal in Brazil:

• we talk to each other calling our first names, and
• we don't use to call people by their surnames.

Usually Brazilians have two surnames:

• the middle one is from their mother's family, and
• the last one is from their father's family.

For example:

• my name is Thaís Lôbo Junqueira;
• my mother's family surname is Lôbo;
• my father's family surname is Junqueira.

P.S.: Legally we can have two surnames, unless you do not want to.

German people here give only one surname to their children, for example.

It is common here to have a compound name:

• my mother's name is Maria Helena (two words) but
• my name is Thaís (one word).

Asian people, like Japanese etc, have a compound name here, in order to help us to pronounce their names:

• my Japanese friend is called Lúcia Naomi;
• Lúcia is her Portuguese name;
• Naomi is her Japanese name.

An interesting site about languages:

http://www.linguaestrangeira.pro.br/links/links_estrangeira.htm