Last year, the Central European country of Germany welcomed 692,989 babies.
What were the most popular names among these babies?
We don’t know for sure, because Germany doesn’t release official baby name rankings. But two unofficial sets of rankings — one from the Society for the German Language (GfdS), the other from name researcher Knud Bielefeld — agree that Germany’s top boy name of 2023 was Noah.
(The rankings by the GfdS account for over 90% of the first names bestowed in Germany in 2023, while the rankings by Bielefeld account for about 40% of the babies born in Germany in 2023. Both sets of rankings combine different spellings of the same name.)
Here are Germany’s top girl names, according to both sources:
| Girl names (GfdS) | Girl names (Bielefeld) | |
| 1 | Sophia/Sofia | Emilia |
| 2 | Emilia | Emma |
| 3 | Emma | Sophia |
| 4 | Mia | Hannah |
| 5 | Hannah/Hanna | Mia |
| 6 | Mila | Ella |
| 7 | Lina | Mila |
| 8 | Ella | Lina |
| 9 | Klara/Clara | Lia |
| 10 | Lia/Liah | Leni |
And here are Germany’s top boy names, according to both sources:
| Boy names (GfdS) | Boy names (Bielefeld) | |
| 1 | Noah | Noah |
| 2 | Matteo/Mattheo/Mateo/Matheo | Matteo |
| 3 | Leon | Elias |
| 4 | Paul | Leon |
| 5 | Emil | Paul |
| 6 | Luca/Luka | Theo |
| 7 | Henry/Henri | Luca |
| 8 | Elias | Finn |
| 9 | Louis/Luis | Liam |
| 10 | Liam | Emil |
Finally, here are Germany’s top names of 2022, if you’d like to compare last year to the year before.
Sources:
- Die beliebtesten Vornamen 2023 – GfdS
- Die beliebtesten Vornamen des Jahres 2023 – beliebte-Vornamen.de
- “Germany: Noah and Sophia the most popular 2023 baby names.” Deutsche Welle 7 May 2024.
- Births – German Federal Statistical Office
Image: Adapted from Flag of Germany (public domain)
All such soft names, that’s interesting. Luka/Luca, Matteo, and Clara are the only names with a hard consonant, and even those names are pretty gentle-sounding because of the vowel endings.