Should a fantasy book only have fictional names?

Question

My book is totally fantasy, full of made up countries and places, all with fictional names I created, but most of my characters have real names. Some are English, others are Asian, and some are even African, since the world is pretty big and I didn't want all of the names to have the same nationality. I don't know if this is actually a problem, since none of the people that have read my drafts ever said anything about names, not even about the harder ones, but I think it's worth asking.

Should my book have only invented names, or is it okay to have a mix of both? And should I avoid Asian/African names, since they are harder to pronounce?

Answer 1

When creating fictional world, names serve the purpose of worldbuilding. They invoke memories and feelings from the reader and help to establish linguistic and cultural connections.

First of all, the names should be consistent. You don't want to have John, Bob and K'Tan'Amezoal hailing from the same village without a very good explanation.

Next, if parts of your world are based on real life countries, it's entirely up to you how creative you want to be with your naming. You may go to the extremes of using only the real life names typical for those countries, or only invented names that sound vaguely English (or vaguely Chinese) for example, or any mix of that - all approaches had been already tried in literature. The most popular tradition, as far as I can tell, is to be somewhat creative - use a mix of real, real, but outdated and completely fictitious names.

Another advise that I can give - if you are not very familiar with a certain language or culture and try to insert a character from that culture in your book - be very careful with giving this character a name that you think is natural for that culture.