Ethnicity and population structure in personal naming networks.

ABSTRACT: Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public health and social science. Previous attempts to detect and delineate such structure in large populations have entailed extensive empirical analysis of naming conventions in different parts of the world without seeking any general or automated methods of population classification by ethno-cultural origin. Here we show how 'naming networks', constructed from forename-surname pairs of a large sample of th

SUBMITTER: Mateos P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3167808 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature