Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
The Asian continent

Asian surnames encompass the broad range of surnames which are held by people across the Asian continent. These are very diverse, unsurprisingly given that there are over 45 countries across this, the largest continent in the world, one where over half the world’s population resides and where there are over two-thousand languages spoken. These caveats aside, there are a number of different surnames traditions in Asia which account for a huge proportion of the continent’s people. The following briefly explores some of the foremost ones, specifically Chinese surnames, Indian surnames, Islamic or Arabic surnames, Japanese surnames, Indonesian surnames and Filipino surnames. Some of these surname traditions have impacted on other countries as well. For instance, Vietnamese surnames are broadly an offshoot of Chinese surnames and follow many of the same principles. Accordingly these surname traditions, Chinese, Indian, Islamic/Arabic, Japanese, Indonesian and Filipino, account for well over three and a half billion people in Asia out of the four and a half billion or so people who live across the continent.

Chinese surnames

Mao Zedong

Chinese surnames first began to develop thousands of years ago as a way of indicting lines of descent. As such, Chinese surnames tend to be much older than European surnames or those from other traditions. They are also primarily patronymic or aristocratic in so far as many of the first ones developed as a way of indicating a line of descent from a royal or noble ancestor. These include names like Jiang, Si and Ying. One of the most common surnames of all in China, Wang, is actually the Chinese word for ‘king’ and denotes a royal ancestor. Over a period of 2,500 years since this surname was developed approximately 100 million people have become descended from people to whom this regal surname was applied. Others are topographical and describe the region where an ancestor came from. For instance, Zhou and Wu, two common Chinese surnames indicate a line of descent from someone who lived in the kingdoms of Zhou and Wu back in the first millennium BCE. Others still are occupation surnames. Jí, for instance, indicates an ancestor was a ‘royal librarian’ or scholar of some sort. Jiàn means ‘advisor’. Unlike in most western traditions, Chinese surnames appear at the start of the name. Thus, the Chinese dictator from 1949 to 1976, Mao Zedong’s surname was Mao.[1]

Indian surnames

Ranveer Singh

Indian surnames are quite complex, reflecting the subcontinent’s long history and complex culture. In some respects they mirror western surnames in so far as many Indian surnames are patronymic, descriptive, topographical or occupational, however a further complicating factor is that some Indian surnames are derived from the caste system within Hinduism, the dominant religion of India for several millennia and a major aspect of Indian life to this day. Furthermore, Indian surnames have also been influenced by some Muslim and Christian traditions, as there are hundreds of millions of Muslims living as a huge minority within India. Some of the most common surnames include Sharma, a Brahmin occupational surname meaning ‘priest’ or ‘teacher’, Singh meaning ‘lion’ and Patel, the name for a village headman.[2]

Islamic/Arabic surnames

Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud

Arabic surnames (and hence Islamic surnames) are based around patronymic and matronymic constructions, as well as elements which designate a person’s long-term kinship group or heritage. The word ‘bin’, meaning ‘son of’, appears frequently within these, while the prefix ‘al-’ is also common. The latter indicates a person’s longer lines of descent. So, to take the example of Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia; his name effectively states that he is ‘Mohammed, the son of Salman, of the house of Saud’. Similar names are found in a great many countries even beyond the Arabic world, such was the influence of the Arabs over the Islamic world in medieval times. In Asia one will even find names like these not just in the Middle East, but also in parts of Central Asia and as far afield as Southeast Asia owing to the colonization of much of that part of Asia by Muslim warlords between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.[3]

Japanese surnames

Michio Suzuki

Surnames are a relatively modern concept in Japanese culture, one which only entered the mainstream following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the modernization of Japanese society and culture in the decades that followed. A law in 1873 made it mandatory to adopt a surname.[4] Those which were adopted were resoundingly topographical. Studies suggest nearly 90% of Japanese surnames are topographical and relate to the place where a family had their roots or some geographical feature of their ancestral homeland. For instance, Koboyashi, a common surname, refers to a ‘small forest’. Matsuyama means ‘pine mountain’. Suzuki is one of the most common surnames in the whole country, held by over one and a half million Japanese people, including one of the country's great automotive designers, Michio Suzuki. It is ultimately an occupational surname that was applied to people who worked in the rice paddies. As with many other Asian surname traditions, the surname comes first in the order of Japanese names, with the first name or given name appearing after it.[5]

Indonesian surnames

President Sukarno

Indonesian surnames are some of the most complex of any national traditional. This is because the mass of islands which make up the country of Indonesia today were not ruled by anything approaching a uniform culture in centuries gone by. The country’s unity is instead an artificial construct that resulted from many islands of the East Indies all being ruled by the Dutch between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, a wide range of different cultural, social and lingual influences at work on islands from Java and Sumatra in the west to New Guinea in the east have all left their mark on Indonesian surnames. These have resulted in a wide array of ethnic, occupational, patronymic, matronymic, topographical and descriptor surnames. Some of the most common surnames here are Sari, Setiawan, Hidayat, Lestari and Saputra.[6] In the case of many Indonesian surnames they indicate the immediate line of descent from a father or mother. For instance, if a father’s given or first name is Suryo, then his son’s surname might well be Suryono. Unlike western patronymic surnames where the surname becomes fixed based on the name of a prominent ancestor centuries ago who founded the family line, these patronymic surnames in the Indonesian tradition change from generation to generation. Other common suffixes that indicate a patrilineal or matrilineal line of descent in Indonesian tradition include ‘-putra’ (for men) and ‘-putri’ (for women), meaning ‘son of’ and ‘daughter of’.[7]

Filipino surnames

Ferdinand Marcos Snr.

There was something akin to a surname tradition amongst the native Tagalog people of the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the second half of the sixteenth century and this has also left some small trace on modern Filipino surnames. So too have Arabic/Islamic naming traditions, particularly on the second largest island of the archipelago, Mindanao, a region where the Muslim Moros managed to resist Spanish rule persistently through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These caveats aside, the imposition of Spanish colonial rule from the 1560s onwards down to the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the Spanish were ousted from the islands, ensured that Filipino surnames are effectively an offshoot of Spanish surnames.[8] The ten most common surnames, for instance, amongst the dense population of 115 million are de la Cruz, Garcia, Reyes, Ramos, Mendoza, Santos, Flores, Gonzales, Bautista and Villanueva. Therefore, when it comes to Philippine public life we find figures like the long reigning dictator of the country between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, Ferdinand Marcos Snr., bearing Spanish-style surnames even though they are clearly more ethnically Tagalog[9]

Surnames of Asian origin

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