Abstract
In this study, we aimed to address three comments proposed by Ogihara on a recent study where we found that unique names in China have become increasingly popular from 1950 to 2009. Using a large representative sample of Chinese names (N = 2.1 million), we replicated the increase in uniqueness of Chinese names from 1920 to 2005, especially since the 1970s, with multiple uniqueness indices based on name-character frequency and name-length deviation. Over the years, Chinese characters that are rare in daily life or naming practice were more often used in given names, and the length of given names became more deviant from typical practice (i.e., more one-character and three-character given names and higher standard deviation of name length). Taken together, these findings not only reconfirmed the increasing prevalence of unique names but also demonstrated the validity of various indices in assessing name uniqueness in China.
Highlights
Over the past decades, massive sociocultural changes have occurred around the world
In examining the change of name uniqueness in Japanese names, Ogihara found that it was the pronunciations, rather than characters or character combinations, of Japanese names that have become increasingly unique (Ogihara et al, 2015; see Ogihara, 2021b). He wondered whether this is the case in China. We addressed these questions except for the one related to pronunciation of name characters
We examined whether we could replicate the rising trend of unique names with these two indices
Summary
Massive sociocultural changes have occurred around the world. As a special case, shifts in naming practices have received much attention. Relevant to our current paper, Cai et al (2018) examined the tendency toward unique name selection in China. In that study, they sampled 600 Chinese names, with 10 names for each year between 1950 and 2009. The results showed that Chinese have been more likely to use unusual Chinese characters to name their children from 1950 to 2009 (Cai et al, 2018). Thereby, they concluded that unique names have become more popular in China over the past decades. Since the publication of this study in 2018, it has been widely cited (more than 45 citations)
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