Noah and Emilia are the most popular first names of 2023 for newborn boys and girls. This emerges from an evaluation by the Ahrensburg hobby name researcher Knud Bielefeld, which was published on Friday. The front runners are the same as last year. “It is very typical that such first name fashions develop very slowly, that hardly anything changes over decades,” said Bielefeld, assessing the development in an interview with the DPA news agency.
Another trend that the Ahrensburg resident has identified: gender-neutral names that can be worn by both girls and boys are becoming more and more common. An example: The name Taylor is now also a girl’s name – presumably inspired by superstar Taylor Swift.
Other abnormalities that Bielefeld discovered:
For his statistics, Knud Bielefeld and his team said they evaluated first name data from 412 cities, from registry offices and from baby galleries in maternity hospitals – a total of around 280,000 reports (around 40 percent of all babies born in Germany).
The German Language Society publishes similar first name statistics with, according to its own information, around 90 percent of all data from the registry offices – but later than Knud Bielefeld.
