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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/mbsteak on 2023-10-07 02:51:13.

Apologies if this is not the correct place to ask this. I grew up on the West Coast of the United States and have a good mix of both East Asian (e.g. Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asian (e.g. Indian, Pakistani) friends who were born here. I’m East Asian.

During a recent discussion amongst our friends, we realized that almost all of the American-born East Asian kids had traditionally Western names (e.g. Emily, Karen, Jon) whereas almost all of the American-born South Asian kids had their ethnic names (e.g. Prithee, Neha, Harpreet). Most of our parents immigrated here in the 70s and 80s.

Is there actually a large naming convention difference or is it mainly due to a sample bias of our friend group? Has there ever been any academic study as to why there’s such a large difference in naming conventions?

Our main hypothesis is that East Asian immigrants tend be more heavily Christian and therefore tend to give their children more Christian names (which end up being Western). There were a couple of Indians in our friend group with Western names their families were from Kerala and they were Christian. However, many of my East Asian friends’ parents are not Christian but still gave their kids Western names