A Chinese couple who wanted a distinctive name for their baby boy and came up with the symbol @ have earned a rebuke from the government's language watchdog.

The parents claimed the commonly used email symbol, pronounced in English as "at", sounded like the Mandarin for "love him" when spoken by Chinese.

But the government's state language commission has taken a dim view of the attempt to break the mould in a country where almost 90% of the country's 1.3 billion people share just 129 surnames.