Making sense of family names

Assistant Professor Chung Wai-keung commented that in the early days of Singapore, one's family name is registered based on phonetics and hence, there is a large dialect influence in how our family names sound.  Whereas in Hong Kong, the English family names are based on Cantonese pronunciation and in China, the basis is hanyu pinyin.  New immigrants to Singapore will naturally get used to this after understanding the cultural legacy of dialect groups here.