Korean Family Name Distribution in the Past

TL;DR

This study analyzes five centuries of Korean family name data, revealing a long-term stability in the unique distribution pattern characterized by logarithmic and Zipf plots, and discusses its implications.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of Korean family name distribution over five centuries, confirming its stability and comparing it with other countries' power-law distributions.

Findings

Family name distribution has remained stable over 500 years.

Distribution follows a logarithmic and Zipf plot pattern.

Comparison with other countries shows different distribution characteristics.

Abstract

We empirically study the genealogical trees of ten families for about five centuries in Korea. Although each family tree contains only the paternal part, the family names of women married to the family have been recorded, which allows us to estimate roughly the family name distributions for the past five hundred years. Revealed is the fact that the unique Korean family name distribution, characterized by a logarithmic form of the cumulative distribution and an exponentially decaying rank-size plot often called the Zipf plot, has remained unchanged for a long time. We discuss the implications of our results within a recently suggested theoretical model and compare them with observations in other countries in which power-law forms are abundantly found.