Kim, Park And Lee: Why Do #Koreans Have So Few Surnames?: Only three surnames, Kim, Lee and Park, account for the appellations of nearly one-half of all Koreans. According to South Korea’s National Statistical Office, the most popular Korean surnames after those first “big three” are: Choi, Jeong, Kang, Yoon, Jang and Shin. But Kim remains the champ by a wide margin, with government statistics suggesting that more than one-fifth of all Koreans have this surname, some 10 million of them in South Korea alone. (In the United States, the most popular surnames are Smith, Jones and Williams, but they do not dominate the American naming landscape the way Kim, Lee and Park do in Korea. (Of course, the U.S. is a far more ethnically diverse nation than the essentially homogenous state of Korea). On the whole, according to various accounts, there are no more than about 250 surnames currently in use in Korea (in contrast, in Japan and the Netherlands there are more than 100,000 active surnames in each society). Koreas paucity of surnames and the heavy concentration of a handful of those names are linked to the peninsulas long feudal history and its complex relationships with aggressive neighbors China and Japan.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 13:08:00 +0000
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