Chronological onomastics: A global analysis of personal-name orthography from 3500 BCE to 2018 C

Personal names encode orthographic signatures shaped by linguistic history and cultural contact. Using a large-scale dataset of 2.29 million notable individuals assigned to 19 geographic subregions, we show that letter frequency distributions in names differ significantly by region (chi-square (χ²) test, p-value < 10⁻³⁰⁰). Terminal letter positions exhibit stronger geographic signal than initial positions (Cramér's V = 0.125 vs. 0.083). Hierarchical clustering of pairwise χ² statistics recovers culturally coherent groupings, including a European–North American–Oceanic cluster and a Levant–Arabian Peninsula–North African cluster, consistent with known linguistic genealogies. A recursive linear influence model applied to decade-level naming vectors identifies asymmetric patterns of cultural transmission: European naming conventions show strong outward influence into the Americas and Oceania, while East Asian naming systems exhibit high self-retention and limited external influence. These results demonstrate that orthographic patterns in personal names preserve detectable traces of historical contact, colonisation, and linguistic divergence.