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HOST:
Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, in VOA Special English.
(MUSIC)
I'm Doug Johnson. On our show this week:
We listen to some music from Deborah Harry ...
Answer a question about the iPod ...
And tell about a recent report listing common names in America.
Census Study of Names
HOST:
The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare asked "What's in a name?" The United States government has an answer. Faith Lapidus explains.
FAITH LAPIDUS:
The United States Census Bureau has released a report about family names. The information comes from the study of the American population in two thousand.
The report tells the most common last names of Americans and some information linked to them. It says people recognize others by their names, and that people can tell a lot about a person just from knowing his or her name.
Almost two hundred seventy million people provided information to the Census Bureau in two thousand. The researchers found six million different last names among them. One million or more people have one of seven names. The most common is Smith. More than two million people answer to that name.
The next most common names are Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller and Davis. More than one million people are called each of those names. Two hundred sixty-eight other family names are also fairly common. Each of those names is shared by more than one hundred thousand people.
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| Students in New Mexico perform a traditional Hispanic dance |
The study also found that for the first time, two Hispanic names are among the top ten most common names in the country. They are Garcia and Rodriguez. Each name is shared by more than eight hundred thousand people. The report says more than ninety percent of all people with those names are Hispanic.
One newspaper report says it is probably the first time that any non-English sounding name has been listed among the most common. The presence of those names on the list shows that an increasing number of Hispanic people are living in the United States. The number grew by fifty-eight percent in the nineteen nineties to almost thirteen percent of the population.
Other Hispanic names appearing in the top twenty-five most common names are Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez and Gonzalez.
