Have there been studies on the number of different first names (or equivalent) in circulation for different languages? Is there a greater variety of names, for example, among Mandarin speakers, than for English speakers? I suppose the amount of people speaking a specific language would affect this; would a ‘number of names per capita’ be relevant and useful in this case? I am also not sure how to evaluate names with slightly different spellings.
I think the question is not as easy to answer as one might think. There are some names that are shared between languages, and some names, while identified as being primarily “from” one language, are nonetheless used in other language communities. For example, an American, born in the US into an English speaking family, might be named Seamus, which is an Irish name (and is identifiably Irish, in that many people will see it as a specifically Irish name), but the guy probably doesn’t speak more than a few words of Irish.
Does this mean that Seamus is an English language name too, or is it still Irish only, notwithstanding its popularity among English speakers?
I think there are millions of English speakers with first names that come from a variety of languages.
Names work slightly differently in Chinese than in English. In English, you have more or less a standard repertoire of proper given names, while the family names are much more “creative” and have more variations. The situation is reversed in Chinese: There is a standard repertoire of about a couple hundred proper family names (although only about a hunderd or so are in common use), while the given names are just made up by the parents for each individual child and there are huge varieties there. Just as a WAG, I think the varieties in Chinese given names are probably roughly comparable to the varieties in English family names.
This may vary from culture to culture, of course, but there is no reason why names should be language-specific. Certainly in western culture, a huge proportion of names are biblical (Hebrew or greek in origin) or classical (Greek or Latin). I suspect that it is only names which are known to have been invented in comparatively modern times that we can say are definitely indigenous to the language in which they are found, e.g. Fiona, Vanessa.
For the purposes of this thread, I will consider “Seamus” as both an English and Irish name.
Is this really the case? Two hundred or so family names in a country with over a billion people? That works out to fifty million people with the same last name, if it were distributed evenly. That’s like everyone in California and Texas with the same name. This would tend to explain a strong desire for uniqueness with first names, if true.
This Wiki article gives you more details. Under the section “Surname at present”, the statistic is that the 100 most common surnames are shared by 85% of the population, and the top 200 are shared by 96% of the population. I’ll also quote the following from that section:
It may be difficult to answer your question, because first you must define what “different” means.
For example, the Irish name Séamus has been referred to. However, that is the Irish language equivalent of the English name James, and all the other variations on the name of that Christian saint - Iago, Jacob and so on. Similarly, the Irish names Seán is equivalent to John, Jean, Johann and so on.
Of course, every country has unique names with no foreign equivalent, such as the Irish names Brian or Kevin.
To complicate things even more, people often create new versions of names - although they often do not realise they are doing so. For example, they name their daughters Natasha, not realising that this is short for the Russian name Natalia. Or they call their sons Jack, and may not realise it is a pet name for John.
So, what is different?
In Russia, I was told while studying the language, there are far fewer given and family names than in the English world. Telephone directories don’t even bother listing the more common ones, like “Ivan Pavlov”. At least, in the late 70’s.