Examples of front surnames are:
namely chinese, japanese, korean, vietnamese
Example of back surnames are:-
namely american, british, european, turkish, indians, malays
Not too sure about africans. I think they belong to the back category.
Why can't it be the same everywhere? That's why is most immigration forms or any important forms, to avoid confusion, they will ask underline the surname.
The back surnames category can then be further sub-divided into those using the surname of the family or the father like the indians and malays whose surname is that of the father.
The indians names in malaysia have A/L (literally meaning "anak lelaki" / son of) and A/P ("anak perempuan" / daughter of) before the surname.
Eg, Rahman A/L Muthusamy ie Muthusamy is the name of Rahman's father.
Similarly the malays in malaysia practice is the usage of "bin" (for male) and "binte" / sometimes "bte" (for female) to distinguish the gender of the person which is actually quite convenient since you'll know exactly the gender of the person from the name only cos nowadays some names tend to be very unisex, not to mention their sexuality... (but I digress here).
However this practice of adding A/L and bin is not prevalent in India and Indonesia but only in Malaysia. One suspects that this was introduced by the british during the colonization days when they issue citizenship and birth certificates but if this is case, why were the chinese in malaysia spared from this "coding" since to the british, family surnames in front are not common to british.
Well I guess that's because chinese are a very stubborn group of people... a lot more stubborn than the japanese as most time I will get confused about the japanese names ie which is their name and which is their surname. That's because in the west media, japanese names are "westernized" and printed with their surnames at the back but in japanese local media, they revert to their original writing of surname in front.
So for Takuya Kimura which is the surname and which is name? Surname Kimura - Name Takuya. So in japan he will be knowned as Kimura Takuya.
So you'll expect the same thing for celebrity Aiba Masaki right? But turned out Aiba is the surname... gosh... Aiba sounds more like a name than surname to me. So it's pretty darn confusing to foreigners.
This will again bring me to a different topic. Conformity to the west standard. Having come from a colonized nation, I also grew up thinking that the west is the best but thankfully Asia is rising and rising fast!
So whether you have your surname in front or back, it does not matter so long as you know how it all started (ie whose your father, grandfather, great grandfather, great great grandfather (erm i think is too-far-fetched to know)) and don't be bothered about how the rest of the world wanted to call it.
