Map shows most common Surnames by country in Europe
2064
Onomastics is a fascinating area of linguistics concerned with the study of the history and origin of proper names.
Today’s map lies on the boundary between onomastics & statistics—we are going to take a look at the most common surnames in Europe countries and their meanings: Nobody can understand all of the languages the names come from, which is why there is a 2nd map, now with a translation of the names above into English:
There are several things to note: Family names are uncommon in Iceland; instead, its citizens still use an ancient Nordic system, in which a child inherits the first name of its father its last name (the last name of a son of an Icelandic man called Jón would be Jónsson, literally Jón’s son).
Note also that when there are two vastly different linguistic communities within a country. This was the case of Belgium (the two names are for the Dutch- and French-speaking parts) and Estonia (with Russian and Estonian names).
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