In the United Kingdom, baby name data for 2017 just came out of the Office of National Statistics, and it’s showing that the UK is moving toward the same trends as in America. As we’re seeing here, UK parents are favoring “uniqueness” and being influenced by Game of Thrones (hi, Arya!) when selecting a baby name. The UK is experiencing the same rising popularity of the name Jaxon/Jackson, as well. The numbers also reflect the demographic shift in the UK: Many of the fastest-rising and popular names like Zayn, Imman, and Muhammad, can be attributed to the growing Muslim population.
While those names are rising, some of the fastest falling names are old British standards like Craig and Gemma. An interesting aside about Gemma, while it is falling on the British charts (tied for #1568), it’s rising hot and fast on the American charts, entering the rankings at #887 in 2008 and now at #229.
Denmark also came out with its most popular baby name list this week. Topping their charts? Ida and William. While William has always hovered in or around the top 10 in the US, Ida isn’t even in the top 1000 baby names here. Emma, Alma, Ella, and Sofia round out the rest of the girls’ top 5 and Noah, Oscar, Lucas, and Victor the boys’. Of the top 20, some of the more interesting names that might be unfamiliar to Americans are Alberte and Lærke for girls and Malthe and Valdemar for boys. Variant spellings of names rising in popularity in America also showed up on the Danish list, such as Freja (Freya) and Aksel (Axel).
This week’s viral photo of three brothers from Wisconsin has us thinking about sibling names. While on vacation in Brookings, South Dakota, mom Marika Daniels took her three sons, Levi, Logan, and Landon to a children’s museum. Posing her boys with some rubber fish, she only realized after that fact that 18-month-old Landon had stuffed his fish in his mouth! The resulting photo got tons of attention this week, but of course we were most struck by the matchy names of the sibset (I wonder if dad’s name starts with an L?). President Lyndon B. Johnson was famous for his, calling his wife Claudia “Lady Bird” so that she’d retroactively sorta have the same initials. Modern day examples are the Duggars (sooo many J names! Jinger! Jessa!) and of course the Kardashians.
What do you think of families who share the same initials? If you’ve considered initials when naming your babies–either to match or avoid matching–let us know!
Did you know that the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue” was based on a poem by Shel Silverstein? I love both Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein, and I was today years old when I learned this. The song, incidentally, always makes me think about the bias around traditionally female-associated names and how they’re rarely given to boys, while traditionally male-associated names are often given to girls. We’ll get into that in a future (more fiery) post, but a 2018 Atlantic article does a solid job of laying out the issue if you’re interested.
Friends just might be the most popular show on television . . . STILL, twenty some years after it originally aired! This is all due to its entire run being available on Netflix (though only until 2020). A whole new generation of teens and twenty-somethings are falling in love with this 1990s show, and I’m beginning to wonder if one day, say another 10 years or so, we’re going to see a resurgence of babies named Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Monica, Joey, and Chandler on the Social Security Administration baby name list? On a related note, Friends might have been the first time I was exposed to the concept of “baby name theft,” in “The One Where Rachel Has a Baby, Part 2.”
That wraps up our Talking Points! Thanks to our readers, as always, and remember to subscribe to our email list to be updated every time we post!
Slovenia’s baby name data for 2018 also came out and their top 10 names mostly consist of 3 or 4-letter names like Luka, Nik and Mark for the boys and Ema, Zala and Eva for the girls. I don’t really want to splurge every bit of important content in this comment that I’m writing so I have a whole Twitter thread which I have linked on my website’s homepage if you want to know more and head over to the source link yourself.
Thanks for the tip about the Slovenian names. We’ll check that out!