Naming Explainer: Some bureaucratic confusion exists due to different naming conventions in Eastern & Western cultures
Some people of European descent wonder why ‘Singh’ or ‘Kaur’ is so prevalent with South Asians while Indians puzzle at devotion to surnames in the West
John Smith, Gurpreet Singh, and Zhang Wei walk into a bar to discuss their names.
They have a drink, get comfortable, it’s going to be a long chat.
There is a wrinkle for anyone covering courts in 2025 in the Eastern Fraser Valley – or who is involved in any bureaucratic endeavour in the West – due to a distinction between different cultures and ethnic groups and their family naming conventions.
Most Canadians of European descent know what a first name, a surname, and a middle name are, obviously. Surnames are passed down from parents, for most of Canadian history that was the father’s with mothers usually taking the surname of the husband. The latter is less common now. Most children are given the last name of one of their parents, usually the father, but certainly not always.
First and middle names are whatever parents want them to be.
Canada’s increasing ethnic and cultural diversity over the past few decades mean those of us with a European background hear all kinds of names that are new or unusual, yet some of them come up again and again among the largest populations.
Pathologically curious by nature, I’ve pointed out before that when I am unclear on the ‘why’ of something, I figure other people might be curious, too. Or at least similarly don’t understand.
What prompted this inquiry into naming is two different murder cases I’ve been following in criminal court in Abbotsford. One is the case of three men charged with murder of an elderly couple in Abbotsford, listed in court records as Abhijeet Singh, Gurkaran Singh, and Kushveer Singh Toor. The other case is that of five men accused of kidnapping and killing another young man. There names are listed as Jaskaran Singh, Bipanpreet Singh, Inderpreet Khosa, Ravdeep Singh Gill, and Harmandeep Singh Gill.
In fact, since I started writing this, a second-degree murder trial started in BC Supreme Court in Abbotsford. The accused’s name is listed as Jagpreet Singh.
Catch all that?
Any South Asians reading this will shrug with a “so what”? Anyone of European descent may do the same but might also notice that of these nine men, eight have ‘Singh’ in their names. Five have it listed in court records as a surname, three have it as a middle name.
The genuinely confused or intentionally racist say things like, “Are they all related?” The short answer is no.
“Then why do so many of them have the same name?”
Here’s the long answer
In Sikh tradition, Singh (which means “lion”) is adopted by men and Kaur (meaning “princess”) by women as a religious identifier. These names were introduced by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 to blow up the caste system and emphasize equality. Singh and Kaur function less like family surnames and more like universal honorifics.
Many Sikh Canadians also use a family or clan surname (such as Toor, Sidhu, Gill, or Dhaliwal), which may appear as a last name, a middle name, or not at all depending on personal choice and how names are recorded by police, courts, or immigration authorities. As a result, two people listed as “Singh” are even less likely to be related than two people named “Smith.”
Punjabi first names are also usually gender-neutral, which can add to confusion in bureaucratic paperwork. The presence of Singh or Kaur is the only reliable indicator, but it’s one of gender, not family connection.
One irony then, is that while “Singh” and “Kaur” were meant to erase hierarchy, modern legal databases often mistake them for surnames and accidentally reintroduce it.
Originally, everyone was just “first name + Singh or Kaur,” no clan or caste or bragging about lineage by using a high-caste surname. What happens in practice in Canada is people of Punjabi-Sikh origin take a gender neutral first name (e.g. Gurpreet or Inderpreet) plus a family name (e.g. Gill or Dhaliwal) with Singh or Kaur appearing on documents as a middle name, a second last name, or sometimes dropped altogether, which is presumably the case of the one out of nine accused murderers whose name is listed as Inderpreet Khosa.
There is a well-known defence lawyer who works in criminal court in Chilliwack and Abbotsford whose name is Gurpreet K. Gill. She has a gender-neutral first name (Gurpreet), a clan surname (Gill), and we know she is a she because of that middle initial, which stands for “Kaur.”
All of the above, it should be noted, was vetted by my friend of Indian origin whose family owns the longest-running and best restaurants in Chilliwack, Shandhar Hut. Gordon Atti verified the nuggets of my research while explaining it a little more personally and expanding on it. As for Gord’s last name, “Atti,” that’s another wrinkle in our nation made up of immigrants. His family’s origin is from the “Ghumar” caste, a community historically known for pottery. As for “Atti”? That doesn’t fall into any of the above explanations because Atti is the village in Punjab where his family is from.
Other cultural naming
English-speaking Canadians may have noticed a similar proliferation of Chinese and other East Asian names over and over.
There are very few Chinese surnames and they are ancient. Wang, Li, Zhang, Wong, Chan, Lam among others are enormously common with hundreds of millions of people worldwide who share these surnames.
So in the English-speaking Canadian context, Sikh naming conventions are unusual in why those names repeat while East Asian conventions are unusual in how often surnames repeat. We are left with a superficially similar outcome based on totally different logic.
When a Canadian courtroom has three unrelated defendants on the docket named “Singh” or “Wang,” that’s closer to having three “John Smiths” than three cousins.
And don’t forget to throw in one more amazing wrinkle to confused us all further, the surname in Chinese comes first such that “Wang Wei” is “Wei from the Wang” family.
Korean naming conventions are even more concentrated with a tiny number of surnames dominating. You’re not wrong for noticing that most Korean people you know are named Kim, Lee or Park.
Vietnam, however, is the world champion in this regard with “Nguyen” covering close to 40 per cent of the population.
Japan is different yet again with many, many surnames, in a way more akin to Western naming. Names in Japan are often tied to geography, such as mountains, rivers, rice fields.
Where racism creeps in
So now you know how it works and how you can smack down anyone making racist cracks such as “why do so many of them have the same name?”
Assuming all Singhs have some relation is a category error. It treats naming systems as evidence instead of culture.
The criminal justice system in Canada, which insists on a single “last name” field, unintentionally feeds this error by flattening rich naming traditions into a form designed for 19th-century England.
So back to John Smith, Gurpreet Singh, and Zhang Wei, chatting about their names at the bar. What can we say about them?
John’s parents weren’t super creative (no offence to all the Johns, or he was named after a relative) and he may not be super aware of it, but he is the descendant somewhere back there in Great Britain of a blacksmith.
Gurpreet is male, we know from the “Singh,” and for whatever reason, he or one of his ancestors dropped the clan surname.
Zhang Wei’s parents gave him the name “Wei” and he’s the latest in an ancient and populous number of Zhangs.
OK Henderson, what’s your story?
Now that a white guy has told you about South Asian and East Asian naming conventions, you’re welcome, what about those English-speaking European names?
We’ve all probably watched enough movies about real or imagined medieval periods in northern Europe, such that it won’t be unfamiliar to hear that in medieval England and Scotland, people were identified as “John, son of Henry” or “William, son of Andrew” or Thomas, son of William.”
By the 13th century, governments, churches, and tax collectors demanded fixed surnames so Henry’s son became Henderson (some Henrysons are still out there, too), and Andrew’s son became Anderson and so on.
And to unpack a rumour that many of us red-headed folks of northern Great Britain descent have heard, having a “-son” name does not necessarily denote evidence of Viking heritage. Yes, old Norse naming customs use the “-son” such that Erik’s son is Eriksson, in England and Scotland in the ninth century when Danish law ruled because of conquest and occupation by Danish Vikings, the Norse system merged with existing Anglo-Saxon practices.
Viking influences certainly reinforced patronymics in northern and eastern England, it didn’t invent them.
Henry is not a Viking name, it comes from the Germanic Heimrich (“home ruler”) popularized in Britain after the Norman Conquest of 1066.
So Henderson = son of Henry = Norman-era naming = not directly Viking. That doesn’t mean the ancestors of every Henderson were not park Viking, northern Britain is a genetic stew thanks to all the raping and pillaging.
Scotland is particularly confusing as it ran several systems at once, patronymics in the Lowlands, clan names in the Highlands, and English-style descriptive bynames (occupation, location, appearance).
In other words, it’s all less romantic than I might have hoped as Henderson is less “axe and longship” and more “medieval clerk squinting at a parish roll.”
Still, that clerk was probably working in a region where Viking, Saxon, Norman, and Celtic bloodlines had already been arguing over dinner for centuries.
But that’s Britain in a nutshell.
Culture is fascinating and all but the truth is much more boring as we find that bureaucracy is the true parent of surnames.
In some ways, names feel like facts, but they’re not. Names are cultural fossils, and fossils only tell you something useful if you know what era you’re looking at.
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Paul J. Henderson
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