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Chinese surname - Surnames at present

Chinese surname - Surnames at present: Encyclopedia II - Chinese surname - Surnames at present

Of the thousands of surnames which have been identified from historical texts prior to the Han Dynasty, most have either been lost or simplified. In recent centuries some two-character surnames have often dropped a character. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, moreover, some surnames have been graphically simplified. Although there are thousands of Chinese family names, the 100 most common surnames, which together make up less than 5% of those in existence, are shared by 85% of the population. The three most common ...

Chinese surname: Encyclopedia II - Chinese surname - Surnames at present

Chinese surname - Surnames at present

Although there are thousands of Chinese family names, the 100 most common surnames, which together make up less than 5% of those in existence, are shared by 85% of the population. The three most common surnames in Mainland China are Li, Wang and Zhang, which make up 7.9%, 7.4% and 7.1% respectively. Together they number close to 300 million and are easily the most common surnames in the world.

In a 1990 study, the top 200 family names accounted for over 96% of a random sample of 174,900 persons, with over 500 other names accounting for the remaining 4%.[2] In a different study (1987), which combined data from Taiwan and mainland China (sample size of 570,000 persons), the top 19 names covered 55.6% [3], and the top 100 names covered 87% of the sample. Other data suggest that the top 50 names comprise 70% of the population.[4]

Most commonly occurring Chinese family names have only one character; however, about twenty double-character family names have survived into the modern time. Some famous ones include Sima (司馬, simp. 司马), Zhuge (諸葛, simp. 诸葛), Ouyang or Au Yeung (歐陽, simp. 欧阳, occasionally Romanized as O'Young, giving some Anglophones an Irish impression), and Szeto (in Cantonese) (司徒 in pinyin: Situ). (There are family names with three or more characters, but those are not ethnically Han Chinese, for example, Aixinjueluo (愛新覺羅, also romanized from the Manchu language as Aisin Gioro, which was the family name of the Manchu royal family of the Qing dynasty.)

Transliteration of Chinese family names (see List of common Chinese surnames) into English poses a number of problems. It is common for the same surname to be transliterated differently and for different family names with similar pronunciations to be transliterated identically.