The Surname Space of the Czech Republic: Examining Population Structure by Network Analysis of Spatial Co-Occurrence of Surnames

Abstract

In the majority of countries, surnames represent a ubiquitous cultural attribute inherited from an individual's ancestors and predominantly only altered through marriage. This paper utilises an innovative method, taken from economics, to offer unprecedented insights into the “surname space” of the Czech Republic. We construct this space as a network based on the pairwise probabilities of co-occurrence of surnames and find that the network representation has clear parallels with various ethno-cultural boundaries in the country. Our inductive approach therefore formalizes a simple assumption that the more frequently the bearers of two surnames concentrate in the same locations the higher the probability that these two surnames can be related (considering ethno-cultural relatedness, common co-ancestry or genetic relatedness, or some other type of relatedness). Using the Czech Republic as a case study this paper offers a fresh perspective on surnames as a quantitative data source and provides a methodology that can be easily incorporated within wider cultural, ethnic, geographic and population genetics studies already utilizing surnames.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match: Migration of Populations via Marriages in the Past

“…Our observations of clan bimodality for Korea contrast sharply with our observations for family names in the Czech Republic, where most family names appear to be nonergodic [25] (see Fig. 19 in Appendix I).…”

“…Note that the identification of clans with specific geographical origins is not unique to Korea. For example, the origins of British and Czech surnames were also the subject of recent investigations [24,25].…”

Carbon dioxide emissions embodied in international trade in Central Europe between 1995 and 2008

“…For measuring the revealed relatedness between individual products (their RCA), we have similarity measure (sometimes the Dice measure is used, see Novotný and Cheshire, 2012 where, product i in a country a is considered to have a RCA if, and only if, RCA > 1. To simplify the forthcoming quantifications, the RCA values have been transformed into a binary variable.…”

“…For measuring the revealed relatedness between individual products (their RCA), we have chosen the Jaccard similarity measure (sometimes the Dice measure is used, see Novotný and Cheshire, 2012). The Jaccard measure captures the number of countries where both of two analyzed flows of carbon dioxide embodied in a particular product are concentrated (having RCA) relative to the number of countries where at least one of them concentrates.…”

“…A threshold, which would cutoff unimportant values, must be introduced. According to some authors (Novotný and Cheshire, 2012), inspecting the frequency distribution is suitable for this purpose. The threshold J i,j (denoted as T) is then selected according to a clear break in the graph.…”