Names of Mali ML

The names that most distinguish Mali from the rest of the world are Mamadou, Coulibaly and Moussa; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Mali are Mamadou and Coulibaly.

Written in French, Bambara.

Population
20M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
2.4K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 2,417 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 Mali are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Mali included.

How names work in Mali

2 naming traditions are in use in Mali, 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 Mali

Characteristic of Mali

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Coulibalysurname●
Traoresurname●
Mamadougiven name●
Moussagiven name●
Diarrasurname●
The best-attested names in Mali, 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. 372 forms. Licence: CC0.

    What we know about this register

    Top-N given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q912. Snapshot 2026-05-19. N given: 373, N surnames: 209. Heavy notability bias — diaspora/leadership over-represented; use as low-confidence enrichment only.

    Last verified 2026-05-19.

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 Mali?
No — 2 are described on this page (Bambara and Mandinka, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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