List of most common surnames in Asia

This is a list of the most common surnames in Asia, in alphabetical order of the country.

According to a comprehensive survey of residential permits released by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security on April 24, 2007, the top three surnames in China have a combined population larger than Indonesia, the world's fourth-most-populous country. The top 10 surnames each have a population greater than 20 million; the top 22 have populations of more than 10 million. The top 100 surnames cover 84.77% of China's population.

The press release from the Ministry of Public Security only provided detailed numbers for the top three surnames. Information about the others from 2006 comes from a multi-year study by Yuan Yida of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, which purportedly used a sample size of 296 million spread across 1,110 counties and cities.

Indian surnames usually derive from occupational titles or caste distinctions and tend to vary among the wide variety of ethnic groups and cultural regions of India. For example, many common family names in the Dravidian states are rare, or nonexistent, in eastern or northern India, and vice versa. Indian family names also originate from the language spoken in the state or community and depend on the religious affiliation of the family. Hindu family names usually come from Pali, Sanskrit or Tamil and may contain the name or title of a family deity, whereas Muslim last names are usually derived from Arabic, Persian or Turkish. Family names may also indicate lower or upper caste origin of the family as many surnames are exclusive only to certain social groups.

Most Indonesians do not use family last name. There is only a small number of ethnic groups which maintain family names.

Officially, there are 291,129 different Japanese surnames, as determined by their kanji, although many of these are spelled and romanized similarly. The top 10 surnames cover approximately 10% of the population, while the top 100 cover slightly more than 33%.

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