Names of Burkina Faso BF

The names that most distinguish Burkina Faso from the rest of the world are Ouedraogo, Sawadogo and Abdoul; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Burkina Faso are Abdoul and Ouedraogo.

Written in French.

Population
21M
Name forms recorded
2.3K
CBuilt from 2,288 name forms in our corpus.

No official register found for this country — the ranking below is our record corpus alone.

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

How names work in Burkina Faso

2 naming traditions are in use in Burkina Faso, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Burkina Faso

Every record we hold for Burkina Faso — 2,288 name forms across historical registers, the diaspora and several decades of births. Not a census.
#NameEstimated bearersHow common
1Abdoul——
3James——
5Mary——
6Adama——
7Aziz——
8William——
10Souleymane——
11Ibrahim——
13Abdoulaye——
17Ousmane——
19Kenneth——
21Lisa——
22Betty——
23Steven——
24Jennifer——
25Lee——
26Susan——
29Daouda——
30Boureima——
32Sharon——

No official register

We have not found a published name register for Burkina Faso at an authority tier we would headline. The ranking above is our record corpus, and it is labelled as such. If you publish or know of a register for this country, we would like to hear about it.

Characteristic of Burkina Faso

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Burkina Faso 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.

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

Scripts & spelling

Ouedraogosurname●
Abdoulgiven name●
Sawadogosurname●
Jamesgiven name●
Marygiven name●
The best-attested names in Burkina Faso, 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

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

Is there an official list of the most common names in Burkina Faso?
We have not found one at an authority tier we would publish. The ranking on this page comes from our own record corpus and is labelled as such. If a register exists, we would like to hear about it.
Is there one naming system in Burkina Faso?
No — 2 are described on this page (Bambara and Mandinka, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Burkina Faso”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/BF (data snapshot 2026-09-12).