For the fifth year running Muhammad is the most popular boys’ name in the UK, when you account for the alternate spellings, and while most Australians today don’t care a fig what happens over there, it’s just very sad.
Locally, the states helpfully publish yearly stats on this and in New South Wales in 2020 Muhammad was at 39th (190 babies), and there are no alternate spellings of it in the top 100, so in reality it would be higher than 39th if those other spellings outside the top 100 were added in.
Apart from that, if we’re looking for ‘ethnic’ names (excluding Italian/French), there is only Ali at 63rd, and Bodhi at 85th, and Theo at 86th.
For girls Aaliyah is at 63rd and Maryam at equal dead last (74 babies), assuming that they’re both mostly used by Arabish people, not sure.
In the SSR Victoria it’s surprising that it’s not (yet) a gender neutral list, and Muhammad is miraculously, like a flying horse, at 39th (159 babies) also. It’s basically the same as NSW, except Aaliyah and Maryam are absent.
As you might have guessed, Muhammad is absent from the Top 100s for WA, SA, and Qld.
Obviously most people of any origin use the standard biblical, Hebrew, British, and pretentious French and Italian ones, including a lot of first generation immigrants, like Chinese, or going back further, Greeks.
The Greeks in the 1960s and 70s invariably named their local born children John or Peter, sometimes Paul and Andrew, and if not those they were unusually likely to pick old English names that were already out of favour with Australians, like Arthur and Stanley, and some of those antiquatedly named boys may have got made fun of for their names. No one made fun of Stan “The Man” Longinidis (born 1965) though, as he was an 8 time world heavyweight kickboxing champion. Or maybe they did, when he was young, and that’s why he became a kickboxing expert. Stan Lazaridis (born 1972) probably didn’t get made fun of, as he was very good at soccerball, and played for West Ham and then Birmingham City. There is a modest tendency today with the second or third generation to use very Greek names, the type where when you look at them it’s hard to know how to pronounce them.
Some Chinese people, particularly if they are Christian and were already overseas Chinese before they got here (i.e from Malaysia/Singapore etc), sometimes give their children two names, one is Chinese and may be used informally, and one is English and the official name, and we’ll see as this group gets more dominant in numbers and business-life terms whether they will begin to choose Chinese names officially, with the second and third generations, to assert or reclaim their ethnic identity or whatever.
Top Ten in NSW:
Boys | Girls
1 Oliver | Amelia
2 Noah | Olivia
3 William | Charlotte
4 Leo | Isla
5 Lucas | Mia
6 Henry | Ava
7 Liam | Chloe
8 Jack | Grace
9 Thomas | Sophia
10 James | Zoe
Oliver is a terrible name for a boy, it’s public school English gay tier, and he’s going to be called “Olly”, but the real shockers are not in the top ten, and they’re the Js, like Jaxon, Jayden, Jasper, there ought to be penalties for people who give their boys names like this. Maddison, Charlotte, Willow, Harper, Isabella (unless she’s swarthy), Mackenzie, Savannah are also dubious, mainly on the pretension side of things.
The Chinese diaspora in Asia often have a Western nickname for interacting with foreigners, sometimes one that corresponds with their Chinese name, i.e. Ahn Ni becomes Annie.
Like the Italians, they have no idea about the connotations of each name and often choose very old-fadhioned ones. I dated an Agnes and worked with a young lady called Ethel.
They also think that Sunny is a name.
Westerners in Asia also adopt a modified name if theirs is unpronouncable in the local lingo, i.e. David often becomes Debido.
Japanese usually don’t change their names because theirs are easy to pronounce in any language. There are limited sounds and no hard ones, consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel pattern almost all the time.
Makiko. Yuki. Easy.