Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

January 21, 2020 4:23 PM

The most common last name in every country | See also: Why are there so many Smiths in the world?
posted by I_Love_Bananas (95 comments total)

There's 8 people in the entire world with my last name. 7 of us had lunch last Sunday.
posted by signal at 4:36 PM on January 21, 2020 [46 favorites]

Why are there so many Smiths in the world?

They all had (ahem) big hammers.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:51 PM on January 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

Weird. Don't think I know a single Smith and I'm Canadian and travel extensively.
posted by dobbs at 4:56 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

And everyone goes past the crossroads.
posted by clew at 4:56 PM on January 21, 2020

As a Lee I'm feeling remarkably overlooked right now.

Funny because I think it's in the top 5 worldwide aggregate (with Lee/Li variant). Just not #1 anywhere, apparently.
posted by phunniemee at 5:09 PM on January 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

It’s like every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named Smith!
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:16 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Allah is certainly not the most common surname in Jordan. The idea that it is is absurd. Abdallah, possibly; Ahmad is much more likely.

Nor is Al Din the most common surname in Lebanon.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:30 PM on January 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

Interesting that Icelandic "Jonsdottir" is classified as a name "signifying patronage". I thought it was a patronymic name. Also I seem to recall a Malaysian-of-Chinese-ancestry friend of mine telling me that names like "Wang" originally indicated patronage of (or serfdom to) a king? How accurate are the classifications here?
posted by biogeo at 5:30 PM on January 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

I used to have a binder at work full of nothing but Nguyens. Worse than Smiths.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:41 PM on January 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

I’m a little skeptical about some of these.
posted by TedW at 5:43 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Worse than Smiths.

I don't know, sounds like a Nguyen Nguyen situation
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:48 PM on January 21, 2020 [65 favorites]

I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:49 PM on January 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

There's 8 people in the entire world with my last name. 7 of us had lunch last Sunday.

BOB KNOWS WHAT HE DID.
posted by Etrigan at 5:52 PM on January 21, 2020 [56 favorites]

Eh, for India, I wouldn't really call Devi a surname. It's a honorific literally meaning goddess and is often appended to women's names.
posted by peacheater at 6:03 PM on January 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

I am sure there are errors in this list based on the comments above. But the one for Sweden is correct because I just checked the official Swedish statistics bureau and Andersson does top the list of last names. I am not the only one with my particular last name in the world but I am the only one with my particular last name in Sweden. I love the Swedish statistics bureau.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:26 PM on January 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

Can anyone tell me if Khan is actually the most common surname in Saudi Arabia? I have doubts. For one thing, I don't think the Mongols made it down that far; for another, I just haven't encountered it all that much outside people whose families came from India/Pakistan.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:47 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

One weird little bit of family lore is that anyone with our surname is actually related, either legally, or by blood. It’s uncommon enough that it’s an incredible pain in the ass to explain it over the phone to a Japanese speaker, and how to spell it phonetically, that Mrs. Ghidorah* will often, when asked for a name for a reservation or a pick up order, just tell them her name is Suzuki (the most common family name in Chiba). After years of trying to explain my name and how to write it, I’ve realized her method is much better, and yeah, I’d like a table for two for 7:30, the name is Suzuki.

* Mrs. Ghidorah took my family name, which she still gives me grief for, but honestly, her family name is rare enough that people would be confused by it. Even better, her given name is an uncommon reading of a common name for girls, so people reading out her name in a waiting room almost always call her by the wrong name, which she absolutely hates. In conclusion, names are a world of contrasts.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:56 PM on January 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

For the ones that I can catch, surnames like Jonsdottir and Ivanova are gendered feminine, which may imply either a differential of female versus male surname havers, OR sloppy research that can't tell the difference, or both.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:00 PM on January 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

Likewise, as far as I know, the reason that Kim is the most common surname in both the Koreas, and in Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan, is probably a holdover from remnant populations of the Koryo-saram.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:02 PM on January 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

My last name is very common in West Africa (pronounced a little differently) as well as the US, Ireland, the UK, etc. It is great fun to run into someone from Mali or Cote d'Ivoire or Senegal who is also a Kane (closely related to Kone - on the map for Cote d'Ivoire). Family all over the world!
posted by ChuraChura at 7:07 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Icelandic surnames are formed by taking the given name of the child's father and adding either -dóttir or -son to it depending on the assigned sex of the child.

Jónsdóttir is the most common surname in Iceland because Jón is the most common given name in Iceland and because there are more babies assigned female at birth than assigned male. Patronage has nothing to do with it.
posted by jesourie at 7:10 PM on January 21, 2020 [10 favorites]

"Our canoe"?
posted by clawsoon at 7:15 PM on January 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

ivan ivanych samovar: Likewise, as far as I know, the reason that Kim is the most common surname in both the Koreas, and in Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan, is probably a holdover from remnant populations of the Koryo-saram.

Thanks, I was wondering about that.
posted by clawsoon at 7:16 PM on January 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

lmao i can tell you for a fact this didn't take into account ethicities whose officially recognised naming systems have no surnames. I'm cracking up at the Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei ones. (ESPECIALLY the Brunei ones- it's almost all Muslims there, and Muslims here don't have surnames, and also Haji is literally just a title of a man who's completed the major pilgrimage to Mecca). This was going around tumblr and I lol every time.
posted by cendawanita at 7:21 PM on January 21, 2020 [28 favorites]

Seriously, this is some cross eyed euro centric insta-pap for real.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 7:41 PM on January 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

Seconding Cendawanita here, I thought it was weird that the artist assumed all countries had the same naming setup that the U.S. and the West in general (without generalizing) have.
posted by micketymoc at 7:45 PM on January 21, 2020

Jovanović (Serbia), Hansen (Norway), Jensen (Denmark), and Ivanov (Belarus, Russia) all basically mean "Johnson."

See also Johannes (Namibia), Ioane (Kiribati), and John (Marshall Islands).
posted by mbrubeck at 7:58 PM on January 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thirding cendawanita, surnames make little sense in much of the world, though sadly they are being forced into existence by the dominant cultures and technologies.

When I was in second grade in Pakistan I decided I didn't want to be known as Firstname Khan as it is in fact very common and correctly wasn't a surname at all as my family uses it, but an honorific used by men. My grandmother would probably have used Bibi (a women's honorific) but to seven year old me that felt old fashioned so I elected to use a different part of my father's name (now I wish I had gone with Bibi as a feminist statement), another male family title but a less common one. My younger siblings adopted the same 'surname' to make things simpler on the documentation, as did my cousins. Today, decades later, I get appalled when people refer to us as the Lastname family, it sounds so wrong, but that is what we have become.

As for Khan in Qatar and Saudi Arabia - perhaps this is because of the large migrant worker population from South Asia.
posted by tavegyl at 8:04 PM on January 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

Acknowledging the flaws in this map, I am still tickled that Rolle is (allegedly) #1 somewhere (Bahamas). I can hear the kids in calculus class nudging their buddy, saying "It's your theorem, bro!"
posted by aws17576 at 8:19 PM on January 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Jónsdóttir is the most common surname in Iceland because Jón is the most common given name in Iceland and because there are more babies assigned female at birth than assigned male. Patronage has nothing to do with it.

To be fair that's also the origin of, say, Anders(s)on - though I know you mean Icelandic names still work that way.

Incidentally Russian names still include a true patronymic as a middle name, but some older versions are established as common surnames as well, as highlighted by "Ivanov(a)."
posted by atoxyl at 8:29 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

We gave our kids our hyphenated surnames, AFAIK they are the only two on the planet
posted by mbo at 8:29 PM on January 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Incidentally Russian names still include a true patronymic as a middle name, but some older versions are established as common surnames as well, as highlighted by "Ivanov(a)."

So, for instance, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov is a real person.
posted by atoxyl at 8:32 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

He works in the mathematical lumberyard there.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:33 PM on January 21, 2020 [11 favorites]

And also a fake person, apparently.
posted by atoxyl at 8:38 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Smith here. I knew Smith was common. But I'm impressed that it's the most common name not only in the US but in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, too... But with so many of us, it feeds my status insecurity, because I find I'm always counting the number of Smiths in lists of names of people who *matter* (e.g., scientific bibliographies) to see if there are anywhere close to as the same percentage of Smiths on the lists as in the general population. And what have I found? To my great disappointment, Smiths are always appallingly underrepresented. In other words, there are always far fewer Smiths in lists of smart accomplished people than you'd expect from how many of us there are in the general population. What do I conclude from that? That we Smiths breed like bunnies and are as dumb as bunnies, too.
posted by Transl3y at 9:50 PM on January 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

My branch of my surname is dying out after my generation. None of us cousins who share the surname have children. One of the cousins from the woman (married) has children, so different surname. It's all ending with us.

Interestingly, most of the people in the social circle of my generation also don't have children. It's something like 10 couples without to every 1 couple with. We're all in our late 40s/early 50s now so I don't know what's up with that, but it's a choice we all seem to have made.
posted by hippybear at 9:51 PM on January 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

In other words, there are always far fewer Smiths in lists of smart accomplished people than you'd expect from how many of us there are in the general population.

Well, the smiths across history, they've been more focussed on getting things mended or fabricated and less on writing about theory. I raise a glass to anyone who has the name Smith because an ancestor was a smithy. That's hard work and required skill and insight to perform, and they were beloved in their communities.
posted by hippybear at 9:53 PM on January 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

So there I was, trying to get my first apartment. My background check was sufficiently clean, my income sufficiently high. Everything looked good, and now I was in the room with my id and my checks about to sign the papers.

She asked to see my ID. No problem. I handed it over. She squinted at it, then rifled through her papers. "This is the wrong name."

My name is (not really) John Bill Bob Smith, except Bill Bob Smith are in Chinese. By the conventions of that language, Bill Bob together form my given name.

It turns out that this person could not comprehend the idea of a name with a space in the middle. "Are these your middle names?" I don't know. What's a middle name? "I...I can't define that for you. What would you call these names?" Well, first of all, I'd say that was one name. And I'd say that was, uh, my own name, my 名, the name identifying me individually as opposed to my family.

She did not have a space on her form for people's 名.

We went around like this for what felt like a good fifteen minutes. I think I was in serious danger of losing the apartment. Eventually, she decided that I was John Billbob Smith and charged me an extra fee to "correct" my name.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 11:02 PM on January 21, 2020 [25 favorites]

SMITH PARTY!
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:15 PM on January 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh man... that reminds me, I thought I was on the right immigration queue into Mexico, and I was technically correct, but it was mainly to process locals and residents, and I genuinely felt like I was going to get thrown out because the officer couldn't understand my passport's naming structure, and he kept asking about my family name.

Christian Malaysian Chinese also gets into even worse quagmires, because how it worked out is, since Chinese names puts the family names before the given name, and the Western given name goes before the family name, there's an elegant solution if you want to have a baptismal/Christian name and your Chinese name. So, a perfectly formed name would be Angela Tan [per this map] Mei Ling, which means their given names are both Angela and Mei Ling. They don't even have to go far -- friends in Japan who work there face a lot of confusion.

In the UK, i made the choice to have my official last name to be 'binti xxxx' because at least it's roughly grammatically correct and it won't annoy me that I'm being called Ms [my dad's name].
posted by cendawanita at 11:26 PM on January 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

So “smith” as in the now somewhat archaic profession is a common surname in many languages: Schmidt in German, Kovacs in Hungarian, Kovacek in a couple of Slavic languages, Kusnetsov in Russian, Kalējs in Latvian*, Haddad in Arabic, Herrera/Ferreira and variations in a couple of Latin languages. I am curious about the ones it is not in. I would usually translate “smith” into French as “forgeron” but never in my life in a bilingual country have I met anyone with this surname. I guess “Lefevre” has a distant connection, but that is nowhere near as common as the proper-name-equivalents are in other languages. Why is this?

*I know Latvian filmmaker Jānis Kalējs, “John Smith.” He is a vague sort of fellow.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:36 PM on January 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

I would like to see maps drawn by regions within countries. I have been living and working in Poland for a long time and I don't remember ever working with anyone named Nowak, the most common name in the country. But it looks like I live in a relatively low-Nowak region.
posted by pracowity at 11:38 PM on January 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Same boat, hippybear. I have an exceedingly rare Chinese surname and narrow bloodline, and it's been Anglicized independently several times, all slightly different.

My sister and bil chose not to pass on the patrimonial surname but gave it to my nephew as his first name, which reflects the Chinese surname-firstname convention. I thought it was well played.
posted by porpoise at 11:39 PM on January 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I just wanted to mention at this point that 'Fnu' is not an actual given name in Indonesia.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:42 PM on January 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

My mother's family came from Ireland. There are a few hundred people in the US who bear her last name. But, as far as I can ascertain, the name has died out in Ireland itself.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:49 PM on January 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Same, Hippybear. We’re not having kids, neither is my older sister, and I’ve got one cousin with the same family name, and it’s essentially up to he and his wife whether our branch of the family continues. Part of the decision to not have kids came down to realizing my desire for children had a lot more to do with things like keeping the family name going and all the things *I* would get to do because I had kids, and, yeah, not the best reasons there.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:52 PM on January 21, 2020

One of my particularly good applied math classes covered the probability of family names dying out. (Unintuitively high, iirc.) We did it with ?English and Han? starting-condition distributions to see if they mattered and compare to observations, too.

But I can’t remember the mathematical part! Monte Carlo, maybe.
posted by clew at 11:58 PM on January 21, 2020

I would like to see maps drawn by regions within countries.

Maps like these make clear that using Nations as a natural subdivision of humanity is clumsy. Smaller divisions, especially in large countries would make a bit more sense. Among my Mexican family and their spouses and friends (close and distant) I am having trouble coming up with one Hernandez.
posted by vacapinta at 12:47 AM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

And because I grew up with friends and classmates with the Malaysian Christian Chinese naming convention described by cendawanita above, I take it for granted that most Christians outside the West have a "Christian" name and a "local" name, reflecting both their cultures.
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:28 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

My last name is extremely common in the eastern US (to the point where there's at least one town named after it), but pretty much unknown in the UK. I always tell people that there are two people in the entire country with it, and I'm married to the other one.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:35 AM on January 22, 2020

ricochet biscuit: I would usually translate “smith” into French as “forgeron” but never in my life in a bilingual country have I met anyone with this surname. I guess “Lefevre” has a distant connection, but that is nowhere near as common as the proper-name-equivalents are in other languages. Why is this?

"Fabre/Fabron", apparently, rather than "forgeron". And not as common as 'Smith' in English culture, because French family names are heavily weighted towards patronymics, it seems.
posted by vincebowdren at 3:01 AM on January 22, 2020

In Chile there's a class aspect (as with everything): González is 'common' in both senses of the word, and Los Prisioneros sing, in Porqué no te vas, "si tu apellido no es González ni Tapia", i.e.: "if your last name isn't González or Tapia", meaning "if you're not one of the common folk".

Two of the band members where, respectively, González and Tapia but they left out the third one, Narea, because it's uncommon and 'fancy'.
posted by signal at 3:05 AM on January 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

+1 for the title of the post, I_Love_Bananas!
posted by Gratishades at 3:32 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have a terribly unique Polish name. And an unusual first name spelling. I was feeling all special when I discovered, through my father's genealogy work, a gentleman with virtually the same name, not 20 miles away.
posted by readyfreddy at 3:32 AM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Eventually, she decided that I was John Billbob Smith and charged me an extra fee to "correct" my name.

I do payroll and benefits at my job and this is a real problem. When you rely on file feeds to communicate info out to vendors for (I don't want to be melodramatic here but I do think access to your money and your healthcare count as) life or death things, it's important that the systems know what your name is.

Everyone we hire who has a name like Jöhn Bìll Bøb ẞmith I go to them and tell them that due to the anglo-centric nature of our payroll system and the limitations of our report fields, I have to get creative with your name or you'll have problems with your insurance as long as you work here. Would you prefer Johnbill B Smith or John Billbob Smith?

Generally folks are grateful I'm asking at all because I guarantee you Jöhn Bìll Bøb has been burned by this before.

In conclusion everything is terrible.
posted by phunniemee at 4:48 AM on January 22, 2020 [16 favorites]

This is all just making me want to re-read George Mills.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:55 AM on January 22, 2020

I suspect my one-year-old is the only one with her last name. (We hyphenated, and our last names come from different cultural backgrounds.) I probably should buy her the domain name, in case domain names are still a thing fifteen or twenty years from now.
posted by madcaptenor at 5:03 AM on January 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

it's important that the systems know what your name is

I have a last name with an unusual spelling. Let's pretend it's 'Shubert'. Generally, whenever I attend a government office, the functionary asks me for my name, writes down 'S-C-H-' and then asks 'How do you spell that?', followed by rolling their eyes and glaring at me as if I just wasted one of their forms.

I did warn Mrs. C.F. that she would have to face this for the rest of her life, but happily she married me and took my name anyway.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:23 AM on January 22, 2020

Transl3y: To my great disappointment, Smiths are always appallingly underrepresented.

There weren't even any Smiths in The Smiths.
posted by clawsoon at 5:34 AM on January 22, 2020 [12 favorites]

The map has Jensen as the most common surname in Denmark, whereas it is actually Nielsen and has been for several years per official statistics.
posted by Dysk at 6:19 AM on January 22, 2020

I'm a bit surprised that names with spaces are such a problem. I live in the south and having "2 names" as a first name isn't common, but it also isn't unexpected.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:50 AM on January 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

phunniemee, I'm glad that you present it as a matter of shoehorning someone's name into a system unprepared to receive it, rather than correcting the name itself.

Also, that you give them the choice of how it gets shoehorned. I now have documents that refer to me as John Billbob Smith, John Bill-bob Smith, John Bill Smith (this is like shortening John to Jo, it's just a different name), and John Smith. So far, people have been pretty forgiving of these variations, but I live in fear of someday being denied something because I have to produce two documents with particularly different spellings.

In retrospect, I should have picked John Bill Bob Smythe (pronounced Smith) as my example, because another family of misspellings involves people misspelling my name to be more phonetic by English rules. They get surprisingly argumentative about that one.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:10 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

My last name is uncommon but not crazy rare in the West, but my wife also took my last name and is likely the only Japanese born person with that last name.

Somewhat amusingly, its also the name of a mascot for a well known food product, which gets her lots of comments.
posted by thefoxgod at 7:14 AM on January 22, 2020

This seems appropriate. Though, it seems like it's not just programmers that have false beliefs about names.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 7:57 AM on January 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think part of the problem for the people who don't allow name spaces is that there seems to be an assumption that people should only have two given names -- a first name and a middle name -- and one surname. Computers mess up if there's a space in a name (though even many single surnames have spaces). It also means some parents buy into the assumption and feel like they can only give one first name, one middle name, no spaces, etc. and so have to get creative. I know someone who had a hyphen in her first name (think Mary-Jane) to make it one word and it drove every computer everywhere bonkers. She eventually changed it. I had an uncle who when he was in dying and in delirium was called by the wrong name by all the nurses who just assumed that the last word in his name was what should put after "Mr." Like calling Gabriel Garcia Marquez "Mr Marquez" (incorrect) instead of "Mr. Garcia" (correct). Maybe if he'd been well he could have figured out what happening, but in that not-quite-lucid state, he didn't even know they were talking to him since Mr. Marquez (for example) is not his name.

I had hoped to give my kid multiple given names. Then I started looking for names and it was a miracle I found two I could live with. I just couldn't come up with a third name/second middle name.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:07 AM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

I used to have a binder at work full of nothing but Nguyens.
There was a person I sat behind in college for a boring class a long time ago that had a shirt with all the names of the people in their class on the back, from some mega high school in Houston TX so there were lots of names. There were 45 Nguyens listed on that shirt - I counted many times. Far more than Smiths or Joneses.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:25 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've always been dissatisfied with the professions-as-names thing. Exactly which generation did the big decision get made that you were a family of Smiths? Profession is someone inherited (Smith & Sons), so maybe it's 2-3 generations. Still it's a short window. Also the Redditblog post is unsatisfactory. Sure, Smith is a high prestige job. But it's also a rare one. "Miller" (Müller) is another in this category. Maybe people chose names aspirationally? But like 90% of the folks are farmers, so why is Farmer not more common? Why is Gruber ("lives in a hole") so common in Austria? It seems inconsistent. I'm voting more for a frozen accident, like why most of the world drives on the right. I wonder what the freezing event was; at what point are recorded names so important you stop changing your family's?

It's interesting that the most common names in France and Spain (Martin and Garcia) both derive from words for "war". Warrior was not exactly a common profession in the Middle Ages, armies were mostly conscripted for a specific conflict.
posted by Nelson at 8:27 AM on January 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

There was a person I sat behind in college for a boring class a long time ago that had a shirt with all the names of the people in their class on the back, from some mega high school in Houston TX so there were lots of names. There were 45 Nguyens listed on that shirt - I counted many times. Far more than Smiths or Joneses.

Though I will say 'Smith' was common enough that there were two unrelated women with the last name of Smith and the same first and middle names in that same college class, though their first names were spelled differently.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:28 AM on January 22, 2020

Weird. Don't think I know a single Smith and I'm Canadian and travel extensively.

Living in Alberta, I know way more Melniks and Melnichucks than Smiths, but I feel like this province has fewer people of British descent than, say, Ontario or the Atlantic provinces.

A regional breakdown in larger countries would be interesting (especially because even in Ontario, for example, the occurrence of a given surname is probably quite different if you're comparing Toronto or the golden horseshoe to northern Ontario). This also erases Quebec, where I'd imagine Smith is not a particularly common name outside of a few anglo conclaves.

I know someone who had a hyphen in her first name (think Mary-Jane) to make it one word and it drove every computer everywhere bonkers.

My daughter has a hyphenated surname and airline computer systems always drop the hyphen and smash the two words together. It's never been a problem, but I'm always a little worried that we're going to have trouble boarding a plane because her passport and boarding pass technically don't match. Thankfully, this isn't a problem for domestic travel since she's still young enough that she's not required to produce identification.
posted by asnider at 8:30 AM on January 22, 2020

> I would usually translate “smith” into French as “forgeron” but never in my life in a bilingual country have I met anyone with this surname. I guess “Lefevre” has a distant connection, but that is nowhere near as common as the proper-name-equivalents are in other languages. Why is this?

I don't know, but I can imagine it happening in a manner akin to genetic drift and fixation, kinda like this:

I just wrote an over-simplified simulation which starts out with equal (uniform) distribution of names and propagates them generation by generation. In each generation, roughly half the individuals (ie, the male's surnames in the western naming convention) propagate their names to the next generation. New names are added with a low mutation frequency. The population size remains constant (I know, I know) and finite, and there is no selection pressure on which names are chosen.

For such a model it does not take long for the distribution to become heavily skewed, with one or two names being orders of magnitude more common than others. The names that become popular do so by chance, but those that gain an early lead snowball very rapidly (as you'd expect).

This is obviously highly oversimplified and far from reality, but a contributing factor to the Smith popularity disparity may be that Smith (and variants) took hold early in some places, while some other name got a lead in others (eg, Martin in France if the chart is to be trusted), and there wasn't enough mixing between the populations early enough to generate a common winner.
posted by Westringia F. at 8:41 AM on January 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

My daughter has a hyphenated surname and airline computer systems always drop the hyphen and smash the two words together. It's never been a problem, but I'm always a little worried that we're going to have trouble boarding a plane because her passport and boarding pass technically don't match.

My surname is not only hyphenated, it uses two letters that English doesn't (ø and æ) which are transliterated as two characters each (oe and ae). I have had to spend a half hour trying to explain to gate staff that the name in my passport, with a hyphen and a clearly shorter length, is in fact the same as the one without a hyphen and with more letters on my ticket. I was allowed on in the end. But fuck me.

(My surname is also fairly long, and even longer when transliterated, so that's always fun with web forms which for some reason don't think surnames ever come with more than about a dozen characters.)
posted by Dysk at 8:49 AM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

In Malta resistance is futile.
posted by aloiv2 at 9:23 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

French Guiana’s may be Bartleby, as they prefer not to say.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:29 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nothing says “eurocentric” in a map like making Europe bigger than all the other continents, requiring for it to be separated into its own, monstrous landmass.
posted by q*ben at 10:42 AM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Surnames are a Western thing. Not all societies use them.
posted by Chuffy at 11:08 AM on January 22, 2020

My daughter has a hyphenated surname and airline computer systems always drop the hyphen and smash the two words together. It's never been a problem, but I'm always a little worried that we're going to have trouble boarding a plane because her passport and boarding pass technically don't match. Thankfully, this isn't a problem for domestic travel since she's still young enough that she's not required to produce identification.

Contra Dysk, I have a hyphenated last name, have always had a hyphenated last name (tho swapped father & husband at one point), have had many IDs that were wrong (one name as middle, etc.), have flown tons — and have never had anyone make a peep about my name.

So it might just be the non-English letters to watch out for.
posted by dame at 11:30 AM on January 22, 2020

Where were you flying, dame? I've only ever had trouble with it travelling in Asia (though I worry about it everywhere).
posted by Dysk at 11:59 AM on January 22, 2020

At a corporation where I may or may not have worked, "Fnu" stands for "First Name Unknown," and is used when there is some uncertainty about a person's first or last name....generally people for whom the concept of surnames isn't the same as ours.
posted by Chuffy at 12:24 PM on January 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

My almost unique paternal last name is pretty effing long, and in Chile we have 2 last names, paternal and maternal, which are both listed on your passport.
When I was in the US on an H1B, they insisted that my ID had to have both last names, because they were both ON the passport, so I ended up with: FirstName VeryLongAndComplicatedPaternalLastName-MaternalLastName. It barely fit on my driver's license, atm cards, etc. and took about 45 minutes to spell out.
posted by signal at 12:48 PM on January 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Chuffy: "Surnames are a Western thing. Not all societies use them."

Indeed. Whenever I see one of these kinds of surname maps, I check for Indonesia which generally doesn't follow those naming conventions. If it's not marked as "n/a" or blank or whatever (which, frankly if you're putting together this kind of map is more interesting than whatever fiction they picked), then whatever sources they're using are suspect.
posted by mhum at 12:57 PM on January 22, 2020

Where were you flying, dame? I've only ever had trouble with it travelling in Asia (though I worry about it everywhere).

Northern & Central America and Europe. I will consider myself warned when we go to Asia, though.
posted by dame at 1:24 PM on January 22, 2020

It was, shit, over two decades ago now, so things might well have changed! I don't do a lot of flying any more.
posted by Dysk at 1:32 PM on January 22, 2020

I know someone who had a hyphen in her first name (think Mary-Jane) to make it one word and it drove every computer everywhere bonkers.

My first name is hyphenated on my birth certificate, and though I've never written it that way (got tired of adults making bad jokes about wanting to know if I was really "Mary" or "2ndPartofName" and smashed it together at a very young age) it took me a couple of trips to the Social Security office and a certified copy of my long-form birth certificate to have it recorded correctly in their system. I wouldn't be surprised if it all came down to the 1970s recording system not being up to dealing with the hyphen. Or whoever entered it could not accept that I don't have a middle name (I have had people insist to me that the second half of my first name is really my middle name and I'm just confused.)
posted by camyram at 6:52 AM on January 23, 2020

Jonsdottir and Ivanova I wonder if this is sexism, not allowing a matronymic category?

Then the warrior names in France and Spain, could these names have come from children born of conquest, not that I am expecting answers. Maybe kings and others gave soldiers the names, making those names occupational names.

I am the only person with my name, on Earth, the whole name, that is.
posted by Oyéah at 9:50 AM on January 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am the only person with my name, on Earth, the whole name, that is.

Same, though it's true even without my middle name, just the first name + surname combination is unique. Kinda cheating when there are fewer than a eighty people with my surname worldwide though. There's also only my mum, my siblings, and myself with our combination of middle name (which is a family name) and surname.
posted by Dysk at 10:06 AM on January 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Then the warrior names in France and Spain, could these names have come from children born of conquest, not that I am expecting answers.

Can't speak about Spain, but it's unlikely for France. Yes, the name Martin is related to the Mars god, and we do have the root in French in words such as "martial", but the most likely origin is the first name Martin. And that one comes from Saint Martin de Tours, who was a very popular saint in France. In fact, he gave his name to nearly 500 villages/cities and about 3700 parishes in France, more than any other saint.

Surnames issued from given names are very frequent in France. If I look at the list of the most frequent surnames, 11 out of the first 20 are also given names, including my own.
posted by snakeling at 10:37 AM on January 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

My parents are Jim and Jane Smith.


Really
posted by gottabefunky at 11:10 AM on January 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

Why is Gruber ("lives in a hole") so common in Austria? 

Because historically it doesn't mean "lives in a hole", it means "lives in a valley". Which, given the alpine nature of much of the country and the fact that many names in Austria refer to places of origin, is not unreasonable.

There are different sources which count "Wagner" (wagon maker) and "Huber" (farmer who owned land of a certain size, so a class based name) as the most frequent surnames, not sure who's correct.
posted by Omnomnom at 12:06 PM on January 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

I am wondering when surnames became so immutable? Like, when did people in Europe start getting stuck with the name "Miller" even though they haven't had a miller in the family for hundreds of years? A lot of the name words are dated and have fallen out of use as, for instance, job descriptions, which should make them comparatively easy to date, right?

I'm guessing that it had to do with written records in some way?
posted by Omnomnom at 12:11 PM on January 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Why is Gruber ("lives in a hole") so common in Austria?

The real reason is Austria's large population of hobbits.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:09 PM on January 23, 2020

The last branch of my family to come to the US was my g-g-g-grandparents, of which the total knowledge we had of them was that they were named John and Jane Smith and came over in the late 19th century. It's one of my proudest genealogical achievements that I was able to track down the family in the UK even with those incredibly common names.
posted by tavella at 1:27 PM on January 23, 2020

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:35 PM on January 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

That reminds me of how fascinated I was when I finally heard how 'Tran' is pronounced in Vietnam, which is a lot closer to the surname 'Chan' that I'm familiar with.
posted by cendawanita at 7:12 PM on January 23, 2020

Coming to this thread super late, but the first thing I thought of is how badly the Firstname Surname system we Americans are used to handles Tamil names.

That said, it's constantly shocking to me when US-based software can't handle first names with a space (or hyphen) in them, because this is incredibly common in English-speaking, white American culture. Like if your first name is Mary Beth or Billy Joe. How can we still not do this?
posted by capricorn at 8:01 AM on January 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Don't even get me started on how the software at my work can't handle much of anything, including long first or middle names, accents (which break the systems), etc.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:07 PM on January 28, 2020