Knud Bielefeld publishes a ranking of names in Germany annually on his website Beliebte-Vornamen.de
Amateur researcher Knud Bielefeld from Ahrensburg regularly publishes his rankings of the most popular names in Germany. They are considered an authoritative source alongside data from the Society for the German Language (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache). In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Knud Bielefeld spoke about his work and popular names.
– By profession, you are a business informatics specialist. Why did you start researching names?
– I still work in my field, and I research names in my free time. Many years ago, I came across this interesting topic, and over time it became my hobby.
– In your work, you use information about newborns published by maternity hospitals throughout Germany. Please tell us how you conduct your research.
– Most hospitals in Germany publish "Newborn Photo Galleries" on their websites. I and several of my assistants systematically analyze this information. We look through the photo galleries and enter the children's names into our database. Thus, we use publicly available data.
– How representative is this information? After all, surely not all parents agree to have their babies' photos and names published.
– My sample covers approximately 25 percent of all newborns. In addition, I receive official lists of children from several registry offices. At one point, I compared the lists published on maternity hospital pages with the registry office lists. As a result, I found no systematic differences.
– Many people with foreign roots live in Germany. How does this affect the names parents give their children?
– I have not classified names by country of origin. Of course, many names come to Germany from other countries. There are more and more Scandinavian, English, and American names. But this is not because people from those countries and regions immigrate to Germany. Names come to Germany through the media. Additionally, Germans encounter new names while vacationing abroad and then name their children after them.
Slavic and Arabic names also come to Germany. There is data (not mine, I have not researched this myself) showing that names from Eastern Europe and Muslim countries are not as popular among Germans; they are common among people from those countries.
– Your research shows that new trends in names develop very slowly. In the list of the most popular girls' names over the past nine years, only two names appear – Mia and Emma. For boys, the name Ben has been leading for the last seven years. How do you explain this phenomenon?
– Name fashion is not fleeting. If you look at statistics over the last hundred years, it becomes clear that it has always been this way; names have maintained their popularity for decades. This is indeed an extremely interesting phenomenon, because it turns out that year after year, different parents choose the same names for their children.
– Are there names in Germany that have a bad reputation, like the name Adolf?
– Such names exist, and the name Adolf is the best example. It is not officially banned, but it is not customary to name children that. Occasionally, parents name their sons Adolf, but they use it as a middle or third name. I assume this is done to preserve a family tradition.
Kevin is another name with a difficult reputation. It is associated with children who exhibit behavioral problems, from families with less educated parents. The name Muhammad also evokes a particular reaction. These three names are viewed with prejudice, but the reasons for this are different. It should also be noted that the name Muhammad is increasingly encountered in Germany. Of course, Muslim parents name their children that.
– What would you advise parents who cannot decide what name to give their child? On the one hand, there are traditional and popular names; on the other, new trends. Which path is better to take?
– The main question here is whether parents want to choose a common, widely used name for their child or rather an unusual, unique one. If parents do not want their child's name to stand out too much, they can look at the lists of the most popular names today. For those seeking a particularly conservative name, I would recommend looking at data from a hundred years ago and seeing which names were most common in 1917 and have remained popular to this day.
Parents who want to be more modern can use the lists of the most popular names in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the USA. And for those who want something completely original, they will have to come up with a name that no one has thought of before.
– It seems to me that there is a very wide variety of names in Germany. Is that so? Can Germany be compared in this sense with other countries?
– More and more new names are appearing in Germany, this is indeed true and statistically confirmed. Thirty years ago, there were far fewer names. However, in the last ten years, the situation has remained at the same level. A similar trend is observed in neighboring countries, for example, in Denmark and France. In these countries, more liberal rules for using names were introduced, and many parents are now happily using this new freedom.