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Coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics has gotten me thinking about a lot of things, but one of the less expected topics of thought has been the American media’s inconsistent approach to word order in East Asian names. I imagine that most people of East Asian descent will consider this old news, but I nevertheless find it interesting.

As most readers probably know, Chinese names (and Korean ones too, though not Japanese ones*) are conventionally written with the family name followed by the given name, rather than the reverse, as is common in most of the rest of the world. For example, Yao Ming, almost certainly the most globally famous Chinese citizen today, wears a Houston Rockets jersey with “YAO” written on the back; Yao is his family name, and Ming his given name. Similarly, Kim Jong-il, the mysterious Supreme Leader of North Korea, comes from the Kim family. (Fun fact: some 22% of Koreans carry the family name of Kim.) As a service to its primarily Western audience, Wikipedia in English generally includes a note about this convention at the top of articles about notable East Asians: “This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yao.”

The fact that this convention does not match Western practice means that Western publications have an interesting dilemma. Should they render Chinese and Korean names in their correct form and run the risk of “misinforming” ignorant readers who might then mistakenly address the NBA center as “Mr. Ming?” Or should they reverse the names, thus implicitly demanding that East Asians conform to the West’s brazenly individualistic modus operandi? (The title of this post comes from a character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ro Laren, who refuses to tolerate clueless humans who call her “Ensign Laren” in spite of her people’s preferred nomenclature.) Wikipedia seems to strive for the former but is not entirely consistent: Yunjin Kim is Yunjin Kim, even though she was famous in Korea long before she joined the cast of Lost.

Western media outlets’ inability to agree on an answer to this question has resulted in a great disservice to viewers and readers, who must now contend with widespread confusion as different sources identify East Asians with different syntax conventions. Incredibly, some sources are even internally inconsistent; in what I think is legitimate to call an editorial gaffe, today’s San Jose Mercury News includes a column about pairs’ skating that refers to Chinese frontrunners Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao, as well as a daily results summary that mentions Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo. (The latter renditions are correct.)

NBC, for its part, appears to take the culturally sensitive high road, always printing the family name first. But in a subtle but unmistakable demonstration of how little it thinks of its viewers, NBC also helpfully renders family names in slightly larger text than given names in any screen that includes both. (Watch closely tonight, if you don’t believe me.)

But is this really more accurate? South Korean skater Kim Yu-Na, many analysts’ favorite for the ladies’ gold medal, actually has a Facebook fan page (which I can’t confirm is maintained by her) under the name Yu-Na Kim. Meanwhile, her website, which lives at yunakim.com, prominently displays the text, “Figure Skater Queen Kim Yuna,” juxtaposed with her signature, which reads, “Yuna Kim.” Amid this tangled web, who’s to say what “correct” really is?

Perhaps the answer lies in the data. That is, you might argue that “correct” is simply whatever people do. (You might, but I never would.) To see whether this approach holds any water at all, let’s take a look at a very simple metric: the approximate number of results returned by Google for each form of a name, entered in quotes. This metric isn’t perfect, because Google’s query parser does appear to play games with word order (otherwise, how would the second result for [“hao zhang”] be the Wikipedia article for Zhang Hao, which does not include the Westernized syntax anywhere on the page?). It’s also not perfect because Google will find “Lastname, Firstname” in pages when asked for [“Lastname Firstname”]. Finally, it’s a bit silly because there are over a billion Chinese people who would all write these names one way but aren’t proportionally represented in English-language web content.

Caveats aside, this metric still appears interesting and illustrative.

We’ll start with Yao Ming, who proves himself to be a veritable ambassador to the world for the family-name-first dogma:

What about Zhang Ziyi, who rose to Western fame in 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and whom I’ve seen credited in subsequent movies as Ziyi Zhang?

And Kim Yu-Na, who, it seems, can hardly make up her own mind?

The water is clearly murky. Independent decisions are being made about each person according to who-knows-what calculus, leaving those of us who strive to use “correct” nomenclature stuck relying on instincts we don’t have. I can make guesses based on what “sounds like” a family name or “seems like it’s probably” a woman’s given name; sometimes it’s easy because I’ve heard the name before, but it’s often impossible. I just don’t know Chinese names well enough. (It’s less stressful with Korean names because there are so many family names that are readily recognizable as Korean.)

The result is that we are all probably wrong as often as we are right (East Asians among us excepted).

But if you think Chinese and Korean naming conventions are strange, try visiting South India. Had I been born and raised in my family’s home state of Tamil Nadu, where the use of a family name has never been customary, my name might most commonly be written as “B. Prabhu.” At least that was true twenty-five years ago; I’m honestly not sure what people do today.

The final question, I suppose, is whether we should care about any of this. After all, what’s in a name?

*Key notes in the comments that Japanese names are surname-first too, although I don’t think I’ve seen them written that way in English.