Names of Guinea-Bissau GW

The names that most distinguish Guinea-Bissau from the rest of the world are Balde, Gomes and Djalo.

Written in Portuguese.

Population
1.9M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
155
BBuilt from 1 official register, 155 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 Guinea-Bissau are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Guinea-Bissau included.

How names work in Guinea-Bissau

2 naming traditions are in use in Guinea-Bissau, 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 Guinea-Bissau

Characteristic of Guinea-Bissau

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Guinea-Bissau 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.

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

Scripts & spelling

Gomessurname●
Baldesurname●
Silvasurname●
Mendessurname●
Manesurname●
The best-attested names in Guinea-Bissau, 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

  • A comprehensive look at the most common surnames in Guinea-Bissau, compiled by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística de2026not a population count

    surnam.es. Counts: not recorded. surname. 50 forms. 2026. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. A comprehensive look at the most common surnames in Guinea-Bissau, compiled by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística de Guinea-Bissau. Checked 2026-08-06 (task #42 sweep) for a live per-name existence oracle: INE Guiné-Bissau (stat-guinebissau.com) publishes vital-statistics yearbooks (PDF) but no interactive name search; civil registration is paper/Rapid-Pro-based with no public online lookup. No new source added.

    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.

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 one naming system in Guinea-Bissau?
No — 2 are described on this page (Portuguese, Tetum), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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