Names can sometimes be standardized at the worst possible times. For example, Ellis Island was a huge source of novel spellings, loss of diacritics, Anglicizat

Names can sometimes be standardized at the worst possible times. For example, Ellis Island was a huge source of novel spellings, loss of diacritics, Anglicizations, and other rather atrocious word crimes. However, since perhaps a small, finite number of civil servants were the ones transcribing the names and putting them on official US documentation, this had the effect of basically standardizing a lot of names for families now living in these United States, and possibly reducing the variation that was found among them. While I haven't directly seen many Ellis Island records, I've seen a lot of US Census records, and it's obvious that the census workers always wrote down sort of what they heard, and when it comes to names, there could be all kinds of phonetic trickery going on. This still goes on today, and anywhere you have a bored, underpaid civil servant entering names into a rigid database system, you'll have a rather unpleasant standardization on the lowest common denominator. People who speak Arabic or Indic languages may often choose, on-the-spot, how to romanize their names. There are some romanization standards, of course, for most popular scripts, but why not follow multiple ones in the same word? I imagine that it may go the other way, as well. Whatever country people are immigrating to, whatever written language that database is implemented in, names will get standardized to that lowest-common-denominator.