This project contains lists of first and last names for different cultural groups and countries,
compiled from data freely available on the internet. There are individual lists for
each country/culture, listed by the ISO language code for the associated language.

Two sets of lists are maintained, if appropriate. The primary list is a normalized
one, where all non-ASCII vowels have been replaced by their ASCII equivalents. This
is because of the frequency with which vowels lose their accents when surnames are
moved across cultural or national frontiers. I have maintained non-ASCII consonants,
simply because these characters are more commonly retained. However, it would be a
simple matter to replace these characters with their ASCII equivalents, should this
be desired. I have also maintained non-normalized versions of these lists, if the
original database/list maintained non-ASCII vowels.

These lists have been retrieved from the internet, and thus are no more complete
than the databases that are publicly available. In all cases, credit for the different
lists is provided in the credits.txt file associated with this project. I have
chosen publicly available lists where there is little likelihood of copyright
violation.

Erik Norvelle
erik dot norvelle at neomailbox dot net