In North America at least, the most popular names for babies have changed dramatically over the years. This seems especially to be the case for girls’ names - Florence and Mildred aren’t even in the top 1000 nowadays, yet used to be in the top 10! - but the same phenomenon can affect guys too (e.g. Clarence, Ernest),
Still, a few names seem to be fairly well insulated against temporal change, especially among boys. So, John, James, William, Mary, and Elizabeth are perennially near the top. Some names experience a resurgence after almost disappearing for decades. Witness the recent explosion in kids named Emily and Jacob.
With all that background, my question is whether this is true of names in other languages. In, say, German, French, or Spanish. Are little German boys still called Otto, Hans, and Hermann? Or, is there a German equivalent to Jayden and Aiden?
I’d guess most of the sites that list popularity of German baby names will be in German, but this page gives a chart with the top 10 names for each sex in 1900 and 2005.
Only 3 of the 20 (4 if you count Maria as a variation of Marie) were in the top 10 in 1900. But this is where a top-1000 would be a lot more useful than a top-10. I doubt Sophie is really the German Jayden; it’s probably a name that’s bobbed up and down the top 100 for most of recent history, and just happened to be #2 in 200 but #21 or something in 1900.
My husband is from Switzerland and it’s definitely true there. When he was young (he’s 45 now) very traditionally unique Swiss names were popular. His name is Urs and his brother is Beat.
Now those names are totally out and old fashioned. It would be like naming your kid Herman or Marvin. Babies aren’t called Urs or Beat these days.
This doesn’t answer the question but I thought anyone interested in this subject should know about this site. Type in a name and see graphically how popular it has or has not bee through the years. For example “Hillary” was just about unheard of when our SoS was given that name, peaked in the 80’s at 268th, and then back down to virtually none given that name in 2003, and since then has clawed its way back up to 715th in 2008.
It’s a fun place to play; many names were once common, became the old fart names, and are now resurgent - see for example “Julius”.
Marvin btw is still 273rd and but Herman is not even making the list.
The answer is most certainly yes. For example, here are the 20 most popular boy and girl names in Quebec by five-year period from 1800-04 to 2005-09. They are largely different, but some of them make notable resurgences. See for example Thomas, which was #17 among boys in 1800-04 and still popular in the early 20th century, but which then declined to near-oblivion by the 1960s before climbing back to #5 among boys in the 2005-09 period.
A quick search didn’t turn up any lists of most popular names in Norway on English-language pages, but Statistics Norway has pages showing popularity trends for some past and current common names for boys and girls. My husband’s name, Steinar, to take one example, was quite common when he was born in the late 1950s - about one baby boy in a hundred was given that name. Now it is rare, and my hunch is that most parents who choose it do so because it’s a family name. On the other hand, names like Alexander or Eskil seem to have come out of nowhere.
It is generally assumed in Norway that new national name trends emerge first in Bærum, a well-to-do suburban township to the west of Oslo, and Western Oslo itself. In addition, some naming trends never leave one particular region of the country, so a name that’s popular up north, for instance, may never become common in Bergen.
According to the oldest Eskil I know, it actually invaded Norway from Sweden. Of course his experience is probably a bit distorted, but he claims that growing up in Stockholm in the late 70s it was a perfectly normal name, then he moved to Oslo where it was a weird name nobody ever heard of, and then suddenly a bunch of his older brother’s friends had kids named Eskil.
I was on sabbatical in the US in 1989 and the office had two women with the same last name, a woman and her daughter-in-law. I always found it disconcerting that the older woman was named Janet and the younger one Mary. Now when I was growing up, Janet was a name given to girls; their mothers were named Mary. But of course, Janet grew up when I did and Mary had come back.
I keep waiting for Carol, Barbara, Judy, and the like to come back - you don’t tend to name a baby after your mom, you name it after your grandma. Any minute now there’s going to be a crapton of little Barbaras running around.
Just before our younger son was promoted to the 1-year-old room at day care a few months ago, the infant room got its newest member: Linda. First baby Linda I’ve ever heard of in my life.
Continuing on the subject of Quebec, some names come out of nowhere and top the charts, such as English names like William or Mégane, or invented names like Océane. At the same time, there’s a trend to very old-fashioned (historic) names: over the last several years, babies of my acquaintance have been named Clovis, Aurélie, Emile, and Eléonore. (This kind of trend isn’t easily reflected on a chart because the names are all different, though with a similar inspiration.)
I’m curious as to how the trend in alternative spellings factors in to all this. For instance, an alternative spelling like “Marya” for “Maria” wouldn’t necessarily show up on the list, even though it’s the same name–at least in term of how it’s pronounced.
Based on 2008 births: the most common Israeli boys’ names are Noam, Itai, Daniel, David, Idan, Moshe, Yosef and Yonatan; girl’s names: Noa, Shira, Yael, Tamar, Maya, Talia, Hila, Michal, Adi and Lian. Most of those are either classical Hebrew names (David, Daniel, Yonatan, Tamar, Michal) or well-established Israeli names, that have been around for decades (Noam, Itai, Noa, Maya, Talia). The only “Jayden” of the bunch - meaning the only name I’d never see on someone over 25 - is Lian.
There are obviously many “modern” (AKA trendy) names given to kids today: based on my 5-year-old’s class photo by my computer, roughly one quarter of the children in his class have names I’ve never seen on anyone older (like Tao or Yahli). Several of them also have older names that disappeared decades ago, like Alma, as well as several girls with traditionally male names. Oddly enough, I’ve found that parents tend to be more creative with girls’ names than with boys; perhaps that’s due to the relative dearth of positive biblical female role models.
Interestingly, I’ve recently encountered names consisting of Hebrew words - not originally used as names - that happen to sound like English-language names. Thus, for instance, “Tom” - Hebrew for “innocence” - or “Dean”, which is Hebrew for “Judgment”.
Yeah, I see “Catherine,” “Katherine,” and “Kathryn” in the top 100 today, taken together they would place ~8th on the list, even though individually they’re scattered from 26 to 86th. And if you aggregate everything that could be shortened to “Katie” together (all the variants of Catherine, Caitlin, Kathleen, and plain old Katie or Kate etc) I’m sure they’d win by a mile.
That’s definitely the case in the US as well - I’ve always assumed it was a combination of elements. Boys are more likely to be named after a relative, for example. Girls are seen as less likely to need a “serious” name - “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States, Holly Christmas!” Girls in general, one could argue, have been seen more as pet-like and so people name them things they’d name a Yorkie.
I think that’s true in most cultures (although not all–I vaguely remember reading that the Romans apparently had 3x as many male names as female, and they changed much more over time).
Then again, it may be that most cultures’ historical and mythological traditions have the same relative dearth of positive female roles as the Bible, so your explanation might still hold true.
I wonder how common that is in almost-but-not-bilingual societies?
Many of the Filipino girls I’ve met who were born in the early 70s had either Tagalog names that sounded like English words (and sometimes spelled as the English word) or English names that sounded like Tagalog words, and many of their grandmothers had names that worked in both Tagalog and Spanish.