How popular is the baby name Rithy in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Rithy.

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Popularity of the baby name Rithy


Posts that mention the name Rithy

How did Cambodian immigration influence U.S. baby names in the 1980s?

Cambodian refugee family (traveling to the Netherlands in 1985)
Cambodian refugee family

The Khmer Rouge, which came to power in Cambodia in April of 1975, was responsible for a genocide that claimed the lives of roughly 1.7 million people (21% of the country’s population). The majority of these people were executed; others succumbed to exhaustion, starvation, and disease.

In January of 1979, the Khmer Rouge government was finally overthrown.

In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled the country. Well over 150,000 of these refugees were resettled in the United States. Most arrived in the early to mid-1980s. (More than 27,000 came in 1981 alone.)

Did this influx of Cambodian immigrants have an impact on U.S. baby names?

Yes — Khmer names began appearing in the SSA data in the early 1980s:

197919801981
Samnang.7 boys*7 boys
Sokha..11 girls*
Mey..10 girls*
Maly..7 girls*
Bora..6 boys*
Sopheap..5 girls*
Virak..5 boys*
*Debut

Dozens of other Khmer names debuted over the course of the decade. (The SSA’s state-by-state data indicates that a number of these babies were born in California specifically.) Here’s what I’ve spotted so far:

Veasna and Sopheak were among the highest-debuting boy names of 1982 and 1985, while Sophan and Sarith were the top one-hit wonder boy names of 1985 and 1986.

Another Khmer name that caught my eye was Nary, which re-emerged in the data in 1982 and reached peak usage several years later. (It may have simply been a typo for Mary when it first appeared in the 1930s.)

I’ll also mention that Vanna — which became trendy for baby girls in the mid-1980s thanks to television’s Vanna White — happens to be a unisex Khmer name. This could explain its usage for baby boys that decade.

Other names that popped up in the data during the ’80s — names like Leng, Som, Heng, Chavy, Da, Rith, Narin, and Chany — may have been used by Cambodian families as well, though they’re also used by people of various other cultures (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Jewish).

P.S. In Khmer names, the letter-pairs “ph” and “th” make aspirated P- and T-sounds. So Sophea and Vuthy, for instance, are pronounced soh-pee-ah and voo-tee.

Sources:

Image: Adapted from Aankomst 80 vluchtelingen uit Cambodja by Sjakkelien Vollebregt/Anefo via Nationaal Archief under CC0.

Was a Cambodian baby named “Jolie”?

Scene from "First They Killed My Father" (2017)
Scene from “First They Killed My Father“

A few weeks ago, I watched the Khmer-language film First They Killed My Father (2017), which essentially portrays the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge through the eyes of a 5-year-old girl.

The movie was based on a memoir of the same name by Loung Ung. It was directed and co-produced by Angelina Jolie, and one of the executive producers was her son Maddox (who was adopted from a Cambodian orphanage in 2002).

Late in the movie, a scene set at a refugee camp showed a woman giving birth, then (a few moments later) holding a newborn. As I watched, I didn’t necessarily think the actress was pregnant in real life…but then I saw this in the credits:

This implies (to me, at least) that Cambodian actress Thanet(h) Thorn was indeed pregnant during filming, and that she named her baby “Jolie.”

I’m a little confused about the baby’s full name, though. “Jolie” is in the spot where the surname should be, but I don’t think it’s the surname in this case. Then again, “Thaneth” is also an odd choice for a surname — not because first names aren’t passed down as surnames in Cambodia (they are), but because typically it’s the father’s first name that gets passed down.

If anyone out there happens to know more about this mysterious Cambodian baby named Jolie, please comment and let us know!

In the meanwhile, here’s a photo of Thanet and Angie from a few years ago (posted to Twitter by another of the film’s co-producers, Rithy Panh).

Sources: First They Killed My Father (film) – Wikipedia, How Maddox Jolie-Pitt Became Angelina Jolie’s Right-Hand Man

Images: Screenshots of First They Killed My Father