This is a (slight­ly mod­i­fied) trans­la­tion of a text I wrote in Jan­u­ary on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of last names in Ger­many. It was request­ed by Petra and I hope it meets your expec­ta­tions! My heart­felt thanks go to Robert for proof­read­ing, all remain­ing errors are of course my own.

Dur­ing the Christ­mas hol­i­days I noticed once more how names can shape a region. When I’m trav­el­ling south, I real­ize that I’ve arrived home not only because the Ale­man­nic dialect creeps into people’s speech but also because peo­ple are sud­den­ly named Him­mels­bach, Göp­pert and Ohne­mus: Names that are, to my ear, deeply root­ed in the region.

And sure enough: All of them can be shown to have the high­est fre­quen­cy in “my” or one of the neigh­bor­ing dis­tricts (“Land­kreise”). I then dis­cov­ered an excel­lent strat­e­gy to find more of these last names: I scrolled through the face­book friends of my rel­a­tives. (And I got lots of ideas doing that – you could ana­lyze pub­lic face­book pro­files that spec­i­fy the place of res­i­dence in order to cre­at­ed a city’s “name pro­file”. You could put more weight on names of high school stu­dents, because they tend to live were they were born. Major cities would have to be ignored because peo­ple move a lot, etc. How­ev­er that research strat­e­gy might bor­der on ille­gal­i­ty and would set a rather bad exam­ple con­cern­ing privacy.)

So, what to do if you sus­pect that a last name is typ­i­cal for a cer­tain region? How can you local­ize it? Weit­er­lesen →