Names of Albania AL

INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts) records Mimoza as the commonest given name in Albania; the names that most distinguish Albania from the rest of the world are Hoxha, Gashi and Krasniqi.

Written in Albanian.

Population
3.1M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
6.8K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 6,750 name forms in our corpus, 3 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Albania are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Albania included.

How names work in Albania

Names in Albania follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Albania

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 1
INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts) — 6,172 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
2Mimoza8.7K2
4Shpresa7.9K3
6Vjollca7.4K—
7Drita7.1K7
10Lindita6.9K9
11Valbona6.6K10
14Majlinda6.1K15
16Luljeta5.8K16
17Fatime5.8K—
18Afërdita5.8K—
20Anila5.3K18
21Violeta5.2K—
22Valentina5.2K39
25Fatbardha4.9K—
27Liljana4.8K23
28Sara4.7K59
30Anxhela4.6K24
31Mirela4.6K28
33Alma4.5K—
35Merita4.5K30

Where the two lists disagree

15 of INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts)Across all recordsmimoza: 2 → 22. mimoza2shpresa: 4 → 34. shpresa3vjollca: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. vjollcanot rankeddrita: 7 → 77. drita7lindita: 10 → 910. lindita9valbona: 11 → 1011. valbona10majlinda: 14 → 1514. majlinda15luljeta: 16 → 1616. luljeta16fatime: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. fatimenot rankedafërdita: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. afërditanot rankedanila: 20 → 1820. anila18violeta: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. violetanot rankedvalentina: 22 → 39 · ranks lower across all records22. valentina39fatbardha: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. fatbardhanot rankedliljana: 27 → 2327. liljana23anxhela: 30 → 24 · ranks higher across all records30. anxhela24
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts) on the left; every record we hold for Albania on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.

Characteristic of Albania

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Albania holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

MimozaArbenGezimShpresaAgimDritaLinditaFatmirValbonaKujtimPetritMajlindaAgronLuljetaAlbaniaBesnikAnilaAltinBashkimAstritAnxhelaLiljanaMirelaDritanBujarArtanKleaMeritaArturPranveraSuzanaAferditaErvinAlbanaEltonAnisaDonikaArjanAndiValentinaSaraFatjonEduartBledarAlbanErvisYlliLeonardKlajdiShkelqimAleksanderBlerinaErjonBukurieShpetimDenisArditAlketaElonaKlevis
Sized by how much of the difference between Albania's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Arbengiven name●
Mimozagiven name●
Shpresagiven name●
Gezimgiven name●
Agimgiven name●
The best-attested names in Albania, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts)headline (given)

    Institute of Statistics (INSTAT), Albania. Counts: residents. given. 6,172 forms. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Per-name lookup harvested by iterating a seed of Albanian given names (seed strings only; the data/counts are official INSTAT/DPGJC). API: GET https://www.instat.gov.al/en/search-the-name/?Name=<name> server-renders HTML with one embedded JSON array of {Sex, City, Count}; national total = row Sex=Total_Sex & City=Total_Cities, national per-sex totals where City=Total_Cities. No XHR/JSON API and no full-dataset/"Database" download exists (databaza.instat.gov.al does not resolve). National population stock totals by sex WITH COUNTS (not annual birth counts). Given names ONLY — surnames (Hoxha, Krasniqi, etc.) return the empty template; no surname mode. Implemented in official/scripts/fetch_al_instat.py, which writes under THIS id (al-instat-civil) despite the search-the-name methodology — previously misdescribed under a separate id (al-instat-search-name, retired 2026-08-08, its 5,623-row Jun-9 halted-run output was a strict subset of the below and has been deleted). History: seed started at philipperemy AL given names (zero-hits excluded), first halted 2026-06-09 at 5,103/8,644 names when INSTAT became globally unresponsive (site-wide timeouts via direct, BrightData/Decodo proxies, and Firecrawl alike). Resumed and reseeded 2026-07-30 via official/scripts/build_probe_seed.py (frequency-ranked AL/XK-attested tokens drawn from the mondo_names.parquet mondodb backbone, +9,959 new candidates over the old seed). Final run: 65,478 unique names queried (10,470 positive / 55,008 recorded absent), 66,581 output rows (11,573 count rows: e.g. 2,658 M-only + rows with both M/F counts; count range 1-8,748, Arben 8,748 M / Mimoza 8,673 F). Raw HTML+JSON cached at /backup/leaks/persons/_raw_harvest/al_instat/; checkpoint at /tmp/al_instat_progress.json. Harvester is resumable/reseedable — rerun build_probe_seed.py with --exclude set to the 65,478 already-queried names to check for further headroom.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Questions

What is the most common given name in Albania?
Mimoza, according to INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts), with 8,673 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Albania?
Because they count different people. INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Mimoza. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Arben. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Albania”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/AL (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts).