Emilia, Matteo, Mia and Noah: They all made it into the top five most popular names for girls and boys in 2022. But what about the first names that nobody wants to give anymore?
“This is this phenomenon of the fashion name cycle,” explains first name expert Knud Bielefeld in an interview with WELT. The trained business informatics specialist has been evaluating statistics on first names in Germany for a number of years. To do this, he collects data from hundreds of registry offices and numerous maternity clinics. There are no official statistics in Germany.
A look at the hit lists of the last few decades makes the cycle clear: names that once delighted German parents are becoming outdated over time.
According to Bielefeld, the cycle of fashion names works like this: the names “that you have gotten to know from your own circle of friends are not given to your children”. What is now fading away are the hits of the nineties. “This is this generation of parents: Julia, Daniel, Christian.”
A look at the statistics reflects this: Between 1990 and 1999, Daniel and Christian were always able to get a place in the top 20 most popular boy names. Julia even stayed in the top ten for girls’ first names. This emerges from Bielefeld’s data, with similar trends also being documented in the hit lists of the Society for German Language (GfdS).
After the turn of the century, Julia, Daniel and Christian find themselves caught in a downward trend. In Bielefeld’s evaluation for the year 2022, Daniel comes in 67th place, the name Christian even only in 170th place. Julia performs similarly to Daniel when it comes to girls’ first names, namely in 68th place.
Other hits from the 90s can’t keep up with the cycle of fashionable names either: Lisa and Jan, for example. They are not to be found in the top 70 of 2022. It hits the former leader Kevin particularly hard: He now ranks 242nd. “His marriage was in the early 1990s,” says Bielefeld. Now Kevin belongs to the “typical generation of fathers”.
According to the computer scientist, it takes about 100 years for certain first names to recover. Names from their own generation are in a downward trend, while names from their parents’ generation, which have already gone out of fashion, remain in the background. The old hits would only come back when “there aren’t many contemporary names left,” according to Bielefeld.
As in music or fashion, the popularity of names rises and falls according to a constant pattern. But there is one exception: so-called “spoiled first names”. Bielefeld uses the term to describe names “that were once popular, but have fallen into disrepute due to some event or name model, so that they are no longer awarded”.
The “ancestor” of the corrupt name – at least in Germany – is pretty obvious. “The name Adolf has hardly been given at all since the 1950s,” confirms the expert.
A more recent example is the first name Greta. Bielefeld explains: “Greta was a very popular name a few years ago, now it has dropped over a hundred places.”
The name expert could not prove whether this was due to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, but: “The temporal connection is there.” It doesn’t have to be that parents don’t give the name because they don’t like the Swede, comments Bielefeld . “There are also parents who adore Greta Thunberg and still don’t name their daughter Greta. Because they just know that this name radiates from this famous name model”.
The girl name Alexa also belongs to the ranks of depraved names. Alexa was “never a really common name in Germany,” says the expert. However, since the launch of Amazon’s voice assistant in 2014, the first name has been on a downward trend. In 2019, Alexa was not even one of the top 1,000 first names in Germany.
A survey by the market research company YouGov from 2021 shows that these names are still out. Of the 2,000 respondents, almost 90 percent said they would probably not name their child Adolf. About 80 percent thought it was unlikely they would name their child Alexa — and about 75 percent ruled out naming their children Greta.
Overall, fewer of the most popular first names are given today than they were thirty, forty or fifty years ago. “There are rather different names that are distributed among all the children,” says Bielefeld. “A lot of parents also look at hit lists…they say, ‘I don’t want a top ten name,’ and they look at the list.” Previously, such publication was rare or non-existent.
Despite this development, however, it is possible to recognize a fashion name cycle: “It’s not distributed that way,” explains Bielefeld. The naming expert ventures a prognosis as to which names could go out of fashion in the future:
Because even the children who have been born in the last few years will eventually grow older – and their names will become old-fashioned over time. “All you have to do is open a hit list: ‘The most popular first names in 2000′,” says Bielefeld. “Then you know they won’t play a role in 20 years.”
Now it would be clarified which first names the Germans give less and less. But what about at the other end of the spectrum?
