Names of Latvia LV

PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) records Jānis as the commonest given name in Latvia; the names that most distinguish Latvia from the rest of the world are Sergejs, Andrejs and Andris.

Written in Latvian, Russian.

Population
1.9M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
22K
BBuilt from 2 official registers, 21,823 name forms in our corpus, 31 cited works.

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

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

How names work in Latvia

6 naming traditions are in use in Latvia, 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 Latvia

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2

This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.

PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) — 114,115 given names counted over residents.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Jānis44K—
2Aleksandrs31K—
3Sergejs20K6
4Jeļena20K—
5Tatjana20K10
6Anna20K—
7Andrejs20K5
8Svetlana18K12
9Andris18K7
10Olga17K14
11Edgars15K9
12Irina15K—
13Vladimirs15K15
14Kristīne15K—
15Juris14K11
16Igors13K—
17Artūrs13K8
18Inese13K20
19Mārtiņš13K—
20Viktors12K—

Where the two lists disagree

15 of PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)Across all recordsjānis: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. jānisnot rankedaleksandrs: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. aleksandrsnot rankedsergejs: 3 → 63. sergejs6jeļena: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. jeļenanot rankedtatjana: 5 → 10 · ranks lower across all records5. tatjana10anna: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. annanot rankedandrejs: 7 → 57. andrejs5svetlana: 8 → 128. svetlana12andris: 9 → 79. andris7olga: 10 → 1410. olga14edgars: 11 → 911. edgars9irina: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. irinanot rankedvladimirs: 13 → 1513. vladimirs15kristīne: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. kristīnenot rankedjuris: 15 → 1115. juris11igors: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. igorsnot rankedartūrs: 17 → 8 · ranks higher across all records17. artūrs8inese: 18 → 2018. inese20mārtiņš: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. mārtiņšnot rankedviktors: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. viktorsnot rankedmāris: 21 → 2121. māris21LudMila: 22 → 33 · ranks lower across all records22. LudMila33dmitrijs: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. dmitrijsnot rankedinga: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. inganot rankedvalentīna: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. valentīnanot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) on the left; every record we hold for Latvia 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 Latvia

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Names in Latvia are written in Latin (84%), Hebrew (14%) and Cyrillic (2%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Andrejsgiven name●
Sergejsgiven name●
Andrisgiven name●
Artūrsgiven name●
Edgarsgiven name●
The best-attested names in Latvia, 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

  • PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)headline (given)

    Pilsonības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde (PMLP / Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs). Counts: residents. given. 114,115 forms. Licence: Open data Latvia (CC BY 4.0).

    What we know about this register

    All given names of persons in the Latvian Population Register with count ≥ 5. Columns: Vardi (name), Dzimums (sex: SIEVIETE=F, VĪRIETIS=M), Skaits (count). 114,000+ rows. Updated Jan/Jul annually. Snapshot Jan 1 2026.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • PMLP — Personvārdu meklētājs (per-name population-register lookup)

    Pilsonības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde (PMLP / Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs). Counts: residents. given. 107,612 forms. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Per-name lookup at https://personvardi.pmlp.gov.lv/index.php?name=<NAME> (name min 3 chars). Server-rendered HTML table (Vārds | Sastopams | Vārdadiena = Name | Count | Name-day) returning the queried name plus all similar-spelling / substring variants, each with its own population-stock count. Harvested by scripts/fetch_lv_pmlp.py: seeded from Baltic (LV/LT/EE) given-name tokens in all_official_names_freq.parquet + LV leak first_names, accumulating every name+count pair returned. First pass: 10,127 seed queries → 128,470 distinct given names, of which 119,223 (93%) came from variant rows never directly queried. Latvian diacritics (ā/č/ē/ģ/ī/ķ/ļ/ņ/š/ū/ž) preserved (41,481 names). No sex/year breakdown in the HTML (sex=null). Population stock, not annual births. Counts overlap with the bulk open-data CSV source lv-pmlp-given-names; this lookup additionally enumerates compound given names and rarer variants. Resumable checkpoint; re-runnable. Raw HTML cached under raw/LV/pmlp/.

    Last verified 2026-06-03.

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 Latvia?
Jānis, according to PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register), with 43,623 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Latvia?
Because they count different people. PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Jānis. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Andrejs. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Latvia?
No — 6 are described on this page (Baltic, Russian, Ossetian, Uzbek and Russian, Chechen and Caucasian, Circassian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Latvia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/LV (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register).