Names of Botswana BW

Names in Botswana are recorded in English and Tswana, with a given name followed by an inherited family name.

Written in English, Tswana.

Population
2.3M
Name forms recorded
136
CBuilt from 136 name forms in our corpus.

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

How names work in Botswana

2 naming traditions are in use in Botswana, 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 Botswana

Every record we hold for Botswana — 136 name forms across historical registers, the diaspora and several decades of births. Not a census.
#NameEstimated bearersHow common
1Thato——
2Mpho——
3Katlego——
4Kagiso——
5Tshepo——
6Karabo——
7Tebogo——
8Kabelo——
9Thabo——
10Lesego——
11Thabang——
13Thabiso——
14Onalenna——
16Boitumelo——
17Aobakwe——
18Tumelo——
19Thapelo——
20Phenyo——
22Keneilwe——
24Lesedi——

No official register

We have not found a published name register for Botswana 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.

Scripts & spelling

Thatogiven name●
Mphogiven name●
Katlegogiven name●
Kagisogiven name●
Ncubesurname●
The best-attested names in Botswana, 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 Botswana?
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 Botswana?
No — 2 are described on this page (Sotho and Tswana, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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