Double-barrelled surnames: ask Language Log

Eoin Cullen writes:

For a while I've been familiar with the fact that there is an established set of two-character surnames in Chinese including Sīmǎ 司馬 and Ōuyáng 歐陽, but I was interested to see the novel two-character surname of the head of the SAR government in HK, Lam4zeng6 Jyut6ngo4 林鄭月娥.

It looks like her surname at birth was Zeng6 鄭 and when she got married she chose neither to keep her own name nor to adopt her husband's name, but to join the two in the double-barrelled surname Lam4Zeng6 林鄭. I know some people in Western countries who have a double-barrelled surname for this reason, but was not aware the practice existed in Chinese. Also interestingly, she does not use a double surname for her English name, she's simply Carrie Lam.

Is this practice well established in the Chinese speaking world or is it inspired by the Western practice of joining surnames?

From Abraham Chan:

To the best of my knowledge, this practice became popular in Hong Kong from the 1960s onwards. My mother, born in 1941, has kept using it unofficially (i.e., not on her official documents) as long as I can remember. My impression has been that this practice originated in Hong Kong.

From Tang Pui Ling:

Double surnames are not common in Hong Kong nowadays. But in the past, particularly during the 60s and 70s, it was quite common for a female civil servant to have her husband's surname put ahead of her own.  Here's an article in Chinese on this subject.

From Tong Wang:

This practice is an old tradition dating back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) that the surname of a married woman was put behind her husband's surname and shi 氏 ["née; maiden name") was added behind the surnames instead of the given name of the woman.

Women on the mainland do not follow the old tradition of adding their maiden surname behind her husband's surname after marriage. Not at all. A woman uses the name given at birth for all her life.

I am not sure how popular the revised practice (using the maiden given name instead of shi 氏） is in Hong Kong nowadays or in which specific circles women adopt this tradition. Quite a number of female political celebrities follow it, e.g., Anson Maria Elizabeth Chan Fang On-sang / Can4fong1 On1 Saang1  陈方安生，Carrie Lam / Lam4Zeng6 Jyut6ngo4 林郑月娥, but it is rare in the show business.

I have met a number of people on the mainland who have adopted double-barrelled surnames for various personal reasons.  One of the most notable was Zhengzhang Shangfang 郑张尚芳 (1933-2018), a linguist known for his reconstruction of Old Sinitic.  His father's surname was Zheng, but when he was in high school, his parents changed his family name to Zhèngzhāng 郑张 by combining their two surnames.

[Thanks to Bob Bauer]