ISONYMY AND THE GENETIC-STRUCTURE OF SWITZERLAND - II - ISOLATION BY DISTANCE

Isolation by distance in Switzerland was detected comparing the surnam e distributions between Cantons. The decay of isonymy with geographic distance between Cantons was consistent with Malecot's exponential dec ay of kinship. Lasker's distance was defined as the negative value of the logarithm of isonymy between localities, and it was found that it is linearly and significantly correlated with the log of geographic di stance, both within and between languages. The peculiar geographic and linguistic structure of the Confederation, where mountain barriers ex ist at short distances separating different languages, might explain t he rapid changes in surname similarity. It was predicted that the freq uency of markers linked to the Y chromosome would show a similar assoc iation with distance in Switzerland.