Are we all going to have the same last name eventually?

Question

in 2000, the 5 most frequent last names were Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones. It's possible to imagine that if you do not have a boy to carry on your last name, then in the relative future, everyone will have the same last name. I know that more and more women are keeping their name, but is it popular enough? What if by the year 4035 everyone's name is Smith?

Answer 1

People can legally change their names. No one has to be a Smith if they want to be someone else.

Answer 2

I highly doubt it. If I ever have a son, he's getting my last name - alone or hyphenated. I'm even going to teach him to be open minded and respectable towards women, meaning it's okay to change his name to his wife's, to let her keep her last name, or even to give their kids her name.

I'm hoping by the year 4000, this stupid patriarchal tradition will die out. Hopefully it'll be more of an equality society.

Answer 3

Why don't we all have the same surname as Adam and Eve?

The point of a surname is so we can tell who's who, so if everyone were called Smith nobody would bother using their surname.

Answer 4

People as a rule did not have a surname in Europe until the last melennium. They took or were assigned them so you could better identify them from others.  Think how many men named Henry. George, John or Richard there were.  Today, there would be mass confusion if people didn't have them.

No doubt it would cause mass confusion in the future.  

Still with surnames there can be confusion but without them determining identity would be a mess.

Now in Hispanic cultures a double surname is legal requirement.   They do it just the opposite than they do it in English speaking countries.

The husband and father's name is his father's surname followed by his mother's maiden name.

The wife and children's name is the father's surname followed by the wife's maiden name.

until the daughter gets married

She drops her mother's maiden name.  Pushes her maiden name(her father's name) to the right and puts her husband's name in front.  

This way, it makes identifying people much more exact and I can imagine it is a big help to genealogist in those countries but it can confuse us gringos when they come to this country and they identify themselves by the Hispanic method.  I worked Medicaid claims for a hospital for many years.  Many of the caseworkers for the state understood the way they did their names and had them on their Medicaid card the Hispanic way. It would be better if the caseworkers would explain that their way is not the usual way in the U.S. and it can cause havoc.  They would register with doctors' offices and hospitals where the registrars did not understand those methods and it could cause confusion.  Hospitals have to take doctors' orders by phone.  I wouldn't be surprised if someone hasn't died somewhere because of confusion in the name.

Answer 5

It's far more likely that people will add more names or hyphenate more frequently.  People like being thought of as individuals, more names would make that possible.  So Billy Bob Jones-Smith is a different person from Billy Bob Smith-Jones.

Answer 6

Those are the most common names, not the only names.  Actually, there are probably more names than there were in the past.  Not so long ago, when many Americans and Europeans were illiterate, census takers and record keepers, who could write, often guessed at the spellings of the names they recorded, so two brothers could end up with two different spellings of the same name.  When immigrants arrived they often didn't speak English, so the spelling of their names were also guessed at.  For instance, Cunningham, Cuneen, Coneen,  are said to come from cony or coney, the old Gailic word for rabbit.  Also the population is increasing exponentially, so it is less likely than it was in the past for a name to die out.

Answer 7

Umm... more likely it'd be Chang.  But either way, the whole point of names is to tell people apart.  So if we somehow got to where so many people had the same family name that the name was no longer useful as an identifier, we'd just drop it and start using something else.

Reminds me of an old Steven Wright routine: "I read the other day that the most common first name in the world is Mohammed, and the most common last name is Chang.  But I've never met anyone named Mohammed Chang."

Answer 8

Your logic has holes.

It is very possible that any of us will have daughters, who marry and carry on their husband's surnames.  It is not valid to assume that EVERYONE has only daughters, no one has sons... thus all those daughters will only be marrying Smiths.

Overall, there has to be at least a comparable number of males born, who have their family name.. and it isn't necessarily Smith. If no one was having sons, none of those daughters would have anyone to marry or have children with.  It could also be that all the persons with ONLY DAUGHTERS *might* be named Smith.. so when their daughters married, the Smith name could be the one to die out.