Only 4,100 of the 24,000 family names used throughout China's 5,000 years of history are still in use today.
The findings were the result of a two-year research project by Yuan Yida, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who supervised a survey of 300 million people across the country.
The reductions in China's name base were caused by several factors, Yuan found. Many minorities switched to Han surnames when they came under the influence of the country's dominant culture, he said.
This was especially true in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when a large number of ethnic minorities melded into Han communities.
The other reason for the loss was that some names simply died out because they were not shared by many people, the researcher said.
The transition has not been all one way, however. New names have been added even as older ones landed in the dustbin of history.
"Some parents name their children with the combination of their own surnames," Yuan said.
For example, a father surnamed Li and a mother surnamed Wang might give their child the surname Liwang.
Among Yuan's other findings, most surviving surnames consist of one Chinese character.
And most are derived from words used frequently in daily life.
Some residents of east China, for instance, have the surname Yi (壹) - the Chinese character for "one."
