Ask Lemmy

I wonder if this has something to do with "whom you primarily identify with"? Seems to me that the primary identity comes first in naming systems

Because there's some interesting parallels. Even though the order is reversed, in CJ cultures (don't know about K, presume similar) people overwhelmingly refer to each other via family names (which comes first) instead of given names. Where I grew up in China people almost never refer to your given name; most people refer to others with some honorifics + family name (brother Li, lil' Liu, teacher Zhang, etc). In Japanese culture referring to each other via given names is reserved to close friends only. Also in these cultures the given names have a lot more diversity than in Western culture

It's mostly because "that's how the ancestors did it". In many parts of Europe, the system for last names used to be (and still is in some places) something like "son of [father's name]", which wouldn't really make sense to put first in speech. In other cases, things like place names or occupations were used to identify someone, so something like "George the Smith", which would only slowly be formalized into family names and become "George Smith" in the middle ages. The word order was just kept as it was. On the other hand, in China, family names were introduced by imperial decree about 2000 years ago, to facilitate census data and bureaucracy. For that purpose, it makes sense to put them first, as that's how you do it when organizing them into a table. That Chinese practice would have spread to other parts of Asia etc.

Name conventions can be a bit more diverse than you might think.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

A lot of places around the world put the family name first, including a lot of Islamic majority countries. Western European and their successor countries don't rely on family names as much because they weren't as important.

The old Scandinavian tradition is that the "family" is "name of mother or father" + "daughter or son". Non-noble people in other parts of Western Europe didn't have family names until rather recently. In the UK, family names didn't become big until mass migration caused by the Black Death, which is why a lot of English last names are job titles. Slaves in the Americas didn't get to choose their last name until they were freed, which is why a lot of Black last names today are Freeman.

Since families/clans weren't as important to the working class, it had major impacts on the economic structure of Europe compared to other parts of the Old World.

Well obviously the first name should come first and the last name comes last. That's universal for all languages. It's just the definition of first or last.

Just the question is whether first name is personal or family name...

probably has something to do with CJK languages are based on societies that have implied value to the people while non-CJK languages have implied value to the individual.

IE: your accomplishments are not your own, but those of your family in a CJK country and so your responsibility and the responsibility of every individual is to the family first.

just a guess though.

What makes you think that is more common?

Not sure about other languages, but Russians are more likely to give their name as FIO, familia imya and then ochestvo (family name, given name, and then patronymic), especially in official settings. I'm given to understand the practice was even more common in Soviet and Tsarist Russia.

And if you'll forgive me for being a little sassy, tautologically, all languages present names from first to last.

not really answering but because of this difference and my asian background i keep confusing first name/last name in english. lmao

I always smile when I think of a fictional quote on this. The Asian name order chatacter said:
"So individuals are more important than their family?"
And I believe the only way to go is the Asian name order. And using my name in reverse is not natural.
Tho don't get me started on the US date format. I always mess up month/day. Why is it reversed??
Year-Month-Day is the way to go.

It's all about historical convention. And countries can even use both. For example in Portugal, we use Name, Surname exclusively on day-to-day, but when dealing with government institutions we often use Surname, Name.

And as other comments say in Russia they have even more conventions based on the context.

Have you ever tried a search engine?

Convenience, one would suppose