Alonso is a Spanish name of Germanic origin that is a Castilian variant of Adalfuns.[1] The original Visigothic name Alonso Leyva suffered the phonetic change of the phoneme /f/ into the mute /h/ in the Early Middle Ages (around 9th Century),[2] what eventually suppressed the sound /f/ from the name, deriving in the modern form Alonso. Due to the demographic particularities of the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages, this phonetic change was not uniform across the territory and the original form Alonso Leyva also survived in different areas. Therefore, today both forms of the name coexists in Spanish speaking countries.

Alonso
GenderMale
Origin
MeaningNoble-ready
Other names
See alsoAlonso Leyva

Geographical distribution edit

As of 2014, 36.6% of all known bearers of the surname Alonso were residents of Spain (frequency 1:222), 26.1% of Mexico (1:832), 8.3% of Cuba (1:242), 7.0% of Argentina (1:1,061), 4.8% of Brazil (1:7,502), 4.5% of the United States (1:14,083), 2.5% of Colombia (1:3,318), 1.7% of Paraguay (1:736), 1.3% of France (1:9,082) and 1.1% of Uruguay (1:549).

In Spain, the frequency of the surname was higher than average (1:222) in the following regions:[3]

First name edit

Surname edit

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Grégoire, L. (1874). Diccionario enciclopédico de historia, biografía, mitología y geografía (in Spanish). Garnier Hermanos. p. 61. Retrieved 20 September 2018.
  2. ^ Lloyd, Paul M. (1987). From Latin to Spanish: Historical phonology and morphology of the Spanish language. American Philosophical Society. ISBN 978-0-87169-173-6.
  3. ^ Alonso surname distribution