Names of Madagascar MG

The names that most distinguish Madagascar from the rest of the world are Jean, Rakotonirina and Marie.

Written in Malagasy, French.

Population: 27M
Official registers: 2
Name forms recorded: 307

BBuilt from 2 official registers, 307 name forms in our corpus.

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

fewerlarger share

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

How names work in Madagascar

2 naming traditions are in use in Madagascar, 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 Madagascar

Characteristic of Madagascar

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

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

Scripts & spelling

The best-attested names in Madagascar, 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

Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family namesnot a population count
Wikidata / Wikimedia Foundation. Counts: notable people. given and surname. 474 forms. Licence: CC0.
What we know about this register
Top-N given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q1019. Snapshot 2026-05-19. N given: 474, N surnames: 330. Heavy notability bias — diaspora/leadership over-represented; use as low-confidence enrichment only. CHECKED 2026-08-06: searched INSTAT Madagascar (instat.mg — publishes only aggregate RGPH-3 census PDFs, no name-search tool anywhere; its homepage also carries injected SEO-spam links, a general trust red flag for the domain) and candidate civil-registry domains (interieur.gov.mg, justice.gov.mg, mid.gov.mg, etatcivil.gov.mg, gov.mg — none resolve/connect). No live per-name existence form exists for Madagascar; this Wikidata corpus remains the best available source.
Last verified 2026-05-19.
Assemblee Nationale de Madagascar — official deputy directory2026not a population count
Assemblee Nationale de Madagascar. Counts: not recorded. surname. 154 forms. 2026. Licence: unknown.

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 Madagascar?: No — 2 are described on this page (Malagasy, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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