Names of Bolivia BO
SERECÍ — civil registry names (2024) records Juana as the commonest given name in Bolivia; the names that most distinguish Bolivia from the rest of the world are Mrs, Juan Carlos and José Luis.
Written in Spanish, Aymara, Quechua.
- Population
- 12M
- Official registers
- 3
- Name forms recorded
- 16K
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.
How names work in Bolivia
2 naming traditions are in use in Bolivia, 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 Bolivia
Where the two lists disagree
4 of SERECÍ — civil registry names's top 5 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
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 Bolivia
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Bolivia 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.
Scripts & spelling
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
- SERECÍ — civil registry names2024headline (given)
Servicio de Registro Cívico (SERECÍ) / Órgano Electoral Plurinacional, Bolivia. Counts: residents. given. 5 forms. 2024.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 7 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: sereci_cumulative_registry_2024 NAME-SEARCH SWEEP 2026-08-06: SERECI (under OEP/TSE) has no public name-search tool for the civil registry — only certificate-duplicate services. See new entry bo-oep-yoparticipo-roll for OEP's per-person (not per-name) electoral-roll checker, catalogued as lookup-only per project policy. INE (ine.gob.bo) remains no_data; 'most common surnames' listicles circulating online are journalism citing INE/Forebears aggregates, not a live queryable oracle. No live per-name existence oracle found; not re-searched until infrastructure changes.
Last verified 2026-06-05.
- The page contains a profile of Bolivia, detailing its geography, people, history, and government, published by the U.S.2006not a population count
2009-2017.state.gov. Counts: not recorded. given. 3 forms. 1952–2006. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The page contains a profile of Bolivia, detailing its geography, people, history, and government, published by the U.S. Department of State.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- The page contains a ranking of the most common family names in Bolivia, published by Geneanet.2023not a population count
en.geneanet.org. Counts: not recorded. surname. 12 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The page contains a ranking of the most common family names in Bolivia, published by Geneanet.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
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.
- Cultural Atlasweb
- Highland Aymara and Quechua in Boliviaweb
- Mamani Quispe surnameweb
- Mesoamerican and Andean Surnamesgenealogy
- Naming customs of Hispanic Americaencyclopaedia
- Recovering Indigenous Namesweb
- Spanish naming customsencyclopaedia
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 Bolivia?
- Juan, according to SERECÍ — civil registry names (2024), with 106,843 bearers recorded among boys.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Bolivia?
- Because they count different people. SERECÍ — civil registry names (2024) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Juan. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Mrs. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Bolivia?
- No — 2 are described on this page (Quechua and Aymara, Spanish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Bolivia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/BO (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from SERECÍ — civil registry names.