What's in a name: The Bluebirds - Cardiff City and the Nissan Bluebird

This recent Eid Ul Fitr or Hari Raya to most Malaysians, I had a few friends over. In between the  constant eating of nasi minyak, lemang, lontong and ketupat, we ended up talking about Nissan and a football team over in the UK. I thought I'd share with you folks out there what transpired.

Most of us are aware that Malaysian tycoons have started making themselves known in football (or soccer as the Americans call it). We have Tan Sri David Tony Fenandez owning the Magpies, or Newcastle United and Tan Sri Vincent Tan owning Cardiff City, also nicknamed the Bluebirds. I for one am not a football fan and whilst it is good Malaysia has a foothold in a sport that most Malaysians love to watch, but are terrible on the pitch - look at most of the football games played in the Malaysian league these days, I think that a third division English league team played against any of them, they'd come up league champions if they tried. Cardiff City would be like Manchester United, FC Barcelona or even Ajax Amsterdam.

Anyway, the bluebirds or what they are called were rebranded when Towkay Vincent took over. He changed the colours and then changed the club logo or club crest. The team colours aren't much of an issue, but the club crest as well as the nickname does have alarming effects if pronounced in Chinese, especially the Hokkien dialect. Bluebird  is translated as Lan-Niao in Mandarin.  Lan means blue and niao so Bluebird simply means bird-no problem. 

However, the reading of the characters for lan niao in the Minnan dialect or Hokkien is lan jiao, which also sounds like the word for male genitala. So when Towkay Vincent took over Cardiff City FC, the logo portraying the large Blue bird (pictured at the start of this article) as well as two smaller prints of a flower and a dragon was replaced by one that was fiery red with a dragon taking centerstage and the blue bird relegated underneath it. So the Lan-chiau, ooops, lan-niao is still there, so that English Cardiff fans aren't offended but it still ensures that the naming and fung-shui aspects are altered for prosperity's sake; a bad name can affect the status of anything.

So this is actually the case of the Nissan Bluebird here in most of South-East Asia and in Malaysia. Hokkien is used mainly in the northern states and in the south and a Nissan Lan-chiau may be overlooked by traditional Chinese folk who didn't want to be seen in something that was named after male genitals. And since Nissan in this region is bought by a lot of working class Chinese as well as the older uncle type crowds (I didn't exactly say this, someone I know who used to work at Nissan Malaysia said this) you would want a name change if you sold Nissan to a specific target market.

The last 'Bluebird' sold in Malaysia - the Bluebird U12 series

And so, after much thought, Nissan decided to use the US name for the Bluebird, naming it the Altima in the mid 1990s. This only lasted about one generation and suddenly before you knew it, the Bluebird morphed into something called the Sylphy. And that is another story altogether, somehow people here noticed that it sounded like some venereal disease (something that ended up being pronounced by most Malaysians as Sfilis - Hey, I've heard some uncles calling the car that....it isn't just me). Now as smart as I am, I wasn't the one who first thought so. I suppose this is better than being known as Nissan Male Genitals. But maybe they should have used the Pulsar name like in Australia (a Nissan Pulsar pictured below)

Now speaking about the Bluebird sylphy lineage, you would know that in car terminology, the Bluebird started off life as a mid-sized sedan in the same category as a Honda Accord in the 1970s and 1980s. These days it (the Bluebird Sylphy) actually replaces the compact family car model, the Nissan Sunny/Sentra. In the days before the B-segment car like the Almera, the Nissan hierarchy was basically the Nissan 130Y Sunny, the Bluebird and then the larger 280C/ Cedric. These days, you have the entry level Almera, the small family car sized Sylphy, the full sized Teana. Of course, we have MPVs and SUVs filling out the gaps unlike those days where a car manufacturer can just sell three models and get away with it. 

Times have changed. But boy is it hard to name anything without offending a native in some region somewhere in the world. Heck, who knows there could be a region where Preve could mean 'hemorrhoids'. Who knows.