Culture Based Classifications

• This page is a part of series in Classifying Names by Culture

There are many possible 'culture' based classes that one might want to use. At the finest grained level (and in the most ambitious case), one might want to predict actual countries of origin ( standardized country names are provided by the United Nations). At all more course-grained levels, countries must be aggregated into meaningful units.

Three commonly used (and meaningful) aggregations are:

1. UN GeoRegions
2. Ethnologue Classification - A language development based aggregation
3. US Census Ethnic Origin

Custom Classifications

For the purpose of economic analysis it is often not necessary to know which country an individual's name has its roots in; broad areas of origin are usually sufficient. Areas that are of particular interest (excluding the U.S.) might include:

1. Western European (including the colonies, particularly Australia, New Zealand, and Canada)
2. Scandinavian
3. Slavic
4. Hispanic/Latin
5. Chinese (including Chinese 'dependencies')
6. Arab (Muslim)
7. Israel (Jewish)
8. African
9. India/Pakistan
10. Korean
11. Japanese
12. Other Asia-Pacific (Phillipines, Vietnam...)

We are aware that this list is not "politically correct", but we are not making statements regarding the intrinsic worth of individuals from these areas, or stereotyping these areas, etc. We are merely looking for units that would exhibit greater 'cultural' homogeneity within the area than across areas, and that are identifiable using names data.

Other Classifications

One other potentially useful classification of names is based on differences in writing systems. The following is a loose list of the major writing systems of the world:

• Latin (alphabetic)
• Cyrillic (alphabetic)
• Hangul (featural alphabetic)
• Other alphabets
• Arabic (abjad)
• Other abjads
• Devanagari (abugida)
• Other abugidas
• Syllabaries
• Chinese characters (logographic)