Status: 06.05.2022 3:55 p.m
The most popular first names for children in Germany in 2021 were the same as in 2020: Noah and Emilia. This was the result of an evaluation by the Society for the German Language. The key is the euphony of the names.
According to an evaluation by the German Language Society (GfdS), Noah and Emilia were the most popular names for newborns in 2021.
Noah takes first place for the third time
However, parents of boys did not only give the name Noah most frequently last year: Noah was also the most popular first name for boys in Germany in 2020 and 2019.
The name, which comes from the Hebrew, means “the comforting one” or “the calming one”. The hero of the biblical Deluge story from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament is commissioned by God to build an ark.
| girl | Boys |
|---|---|
| 1. Emilia | 1. Noah |
| 2. Hannah/ Hanna | 2. Matt(h)eo/ Mat(h)eo |
| 3.Sophia/Sofia | 3.Leon |
| 4.Emma | 4. Finn |
| 5. billion | 5. Paul |
| 6. Mila | 6. Luca/ Luca |
| 7. Lina | 7. Elijah |
| 8. Ella | 8. Emile |
| 9. Klara/ Clara | 9.Felix |
| 10. Leah/ Leah | 10.Louis/Luis |
No new additions to girls’ names
For girls names, Emilia was again number one after 2020. As in previous years, the girls’ names in the top ten first names proved to be “quite stable”, according to the GfdS linguists. Compared to the previous year, there were no newcomers in this group. However, some names changed places: Sophia (third place) is now ahead of Emma (fourth place), Mila (sixth place) ahead of Lina (seventh place) and Klara (ninth place) ahead of Lea (tenth place).
A decisive criterion for the popularity of these names is their euphony: the sonorous consonants “m”, “n” and “l” as well as the bright vowels “e”, “i” and “a” lend the name “phonetic aesthetics”, so the linguists.
“Matheo keeps working his way up”
According to the GfdS, Matheo “worked his way up” with the boys in different spellings. In 2020, this name caused a surprise when it jumped from number 13 to number four.
The top ten boys’ names also have a new addition in 2021: Emil in eighth place. Also back in the top ten is Luca (sixth place), who has regularly been one of the most popular first names since 2002 and took first place in 2012. Henry and Ben had to vacate the field for the “climbers” Emil and Luca in the ten most popular boy names.
Between tradition and trend
The linguists from Wiesbaden described the current first name ranking as a “mixture of timelessness and zeitgeist”. This is reflected in the top ten for both boys and girls.
On the one hand there are names that have been in the top group for many years, such as Hanna, Sophia, Emma, Mia and also Lea among the girls and Leon, Paul, Elias and Felix, but also Noah, Luca and Louis among the boys . Mila, Lina, Ella and Klara as well as Matheo, Finn and Emil, on the other hand, belong “to the names of the Zeitgeist category”: They “transport less tradition and more trend”, according to the Society for German Language.
How does the Gfds ranking come about?
The evaluation is based on data from around 800 registry offices with a total of around one million submitted name entries. The registry office data covered 93 percent of all given names in 2021, it said. More than 68,000 different names were reported.