I assume, and please correct me if I misrepresent your reason, that you're referring to the fact that most Vietnamese have last names from a very small pool?
For those unaware: The 10 most common last names in Vietnam makes up 85% of the population, and nearly half Nguyen alone. I looked it up and Bùi is far less common, but still represents 11% of the population...
For comparison, only .7% of the US population is named Smith.
So in terms of naming something so you get recognition, in Vietnam Bùi is about 16 times worse than Smith would be in the US... Of course, internationally it might have made relatively little difference.
(and if it's not on the list of falsehoods programmers might believe about names - I haven't checked - Vietnamese is one good reason why if anyone think sharding users by last name is a good idea, thinking names like Smith is the worst case, depending on their demographics they may be wildly wrong)
Yes, it's one of the reason. As a result, it's super rare to refer to someone by their family name in Vietnamese. Casually people use given names and formally people use full names.
Family names usually come up when referring to the whole family branch of 9-10+ generations like the Nguyễn family or the Bùi family. Because there are few family names, you often see family branches use family name+middle name of the first ancestor to be more specific.
I assume, and please correct me if I misrepresent your reason, that you're referring to the fact that most Vietnamese have last names from a very small pool?
For those unaware: The 10 most common last names in Vietnam makes up 85% of the population, and nearly half Nguyen alone. I looked it up and Bùi is far less common, but still represents 11% of the population...
For comparison, only .7% of the US population is named Smith.
So in terms of naming something so you get recognition, in Vietnam Bùi is about 16 times worse than Smith would be in the US... Of course, internationally it might have made relatively little difference.
(and if it's not on the list of falsehoods programmers might believe about names - I haven't checked - Vietnamese is one good reason why if anyone think sharding users by last name is a good idea, thinking names like Smith is the worst case, depending on their demographics they may be wildly wrong)