Most popular first names in 2022: Emilia and Noah are ahead

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A mother holds her baby: "What's your name?"

Photo: Mareen Fischinger / Westend61 / IMAGO

In recent years there has been a scramble at the top of popular first names.

Now

is back in first place among the most popular boy names in Germany.

Last year it was the name

.

For girls,

continues to be number one in the ranking compiled by first name expert Knud Bielefeld.

"Both names have been in the top ten for a long time," Bielefeld told the dpa news agency.

At the same time, a new name is on the way to the top group.

is rising among the top names

.

It has steadily risen to the top in recent years and is now in sixth place.«

Ben, Lukas and Luka lose places

, which has been enormously popular for years , has

fallen even further.

For nine years, the boy's first name was number one until it was ousted from there in 2020.

In the meantime, he can only be found in tenth place in the nationwide evaluation.

»It seems to be slowly going out of fashion now and even long-standing top names such as

or

are slowly disappearing from the first name lists.«

Even when looking at the back of the table, Bielefeld can identify a first name that is becoming more and more popular.

"Not yet in the top ten, but the name

has risen very strongly ." When looking for the reasons, the name expert has an assumption: "It seems to be because the entertainer and influencer Dagi Bee gave her son that way at the end of last year named."

In search of connections between his statistics and events of the year, Knud Bielefeld looked at the development of the name

and was surprised.

"I didn't think there were so many parents who call their daughter that." The controversial party hit "Layla" by DJ Robin and Schürze was hotly debated in the summer and was often (unsuccessfully) banned at folk festivals.

Layla not sagged

In the popularity scale for girls' names, it has therefore neither dropped nor climbed, as Bielefeld said.

'It hasn't had much of an effect.

The name has been given hardly less often than in previous years.«

And Knud Bielefeld has also identified a trend in the choice of first names for girls and boys.

“There is a big trend and these are names with many vowels that have no other consonants than M, N and L.” The majority of names follow this pattern and the winning name Emilia fits in perfectly.

In general, it is still the case that there are also clear regional differences in the choice of names.

“The naming fashions are still being adopted more slowly in the south.

The old names stick around a bit longer, like

or

.« In the north, the parents are a bit more innovative and Scandinavian names are more common there.

In Saxony, the name

has also been a favorite for years.

"It occurs very, very, very often in Saxony and not so often in the rest of Germany." There is also a new retro name in Saxony:

.

»For years no children were named Erwin at all.

But he's reappearing now - and I'll keep an eye on him."

For the nationwide evaluation, Bielefeld and his small team used first name data from 423 cities.

Two-thirds of the data comes from registry offices and the rest from baby galleries from maternity hospitals.

According to its own information, Bielefeld has recorded around 250,000 birth reports.

This corresponds to about 34 percent of babies born in Germany.

The Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache also publishes similar statistics, with around 90 percent of all data from the registry offices, according to their own statements - but later than Knud Bielefeld.

kha/dpa