Names of Malta MT

NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts) records Elena/elenia/helena/ella as the commonest given name in Malta; the names that most distinguish Malta from the rest of the world are Locklear, Sunday and Zammit.

Written in Maltese, English.

Population
457K
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
1.4K
BBuilt from 1 official register (2013), 1 sub-national, 1,395 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 Malta are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Malta included.

How names work in Malta

2 naming traditions are in use in Malta, 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 Malta

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2
NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts), 2013 — 20 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Elena/elenia/helena/ella106—
2Eliza/elisa/elizabeth/elise78—
3Julia/yulia/julianne69—
4Emma/emmanuela/ema51—
5Maya/mia/myah47—
6Maria/marija/mariah/marie42—
7Lea/leah/leia37—
8Martina Martine36—
9Christina/christa/christabel/krystle35—
10Kailey/kai/kaleigh34—
11Amy/aimee32—
12Anna/hannah/ann31—
13Mikela/makaila/michelle27—
14Sophia/sophie26—
15Jade/giada22—
16Aaliyah/alaya21—
17Chloe/khloe20—
18Jasmine/yasmine/yasmeen17—
19Hailey/hailee/hayleigh16—
20Nicole/nicola/nicky14—

Where the two lists disagree

20 of NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts)'s top 20 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts) 2013Across all recordselena/elenia/helena/ella: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. elena/elenia/helena/ellanot rankedeliza/elisa/elizabeth/elise: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. eliza/elisa/elizabeth/elisenot rankedjulia/yulia/julianne: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. julia/yulia/juliannenot rankedemma/emmanuela/ema: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. emma/emmanuela/emanot rankedmaya/mia/myah: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. maya/mia/myahnot rankedmaria/marija/mariah/marie: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. maria/marija/mariah/marienot rankedlea/leah/leia: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. lea/leah/leianot rankedmartina martine: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. martina martinenot rankedchristina/christa/christabel/krystle: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. christina/christa/christabel/krystlenot rankedkailey/kai/kaleigh: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. kailey/kai/kaleighnot rankedamy/aimee: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. amy/aimeenot rankedanna/hannah/ann: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. anna/hannah/annnot rankedmikela/makaila/michelle: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. mikela/makaila/michellenot rankedsophia/sophie: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. sophia/sophienot rankedjade/giada: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. jade/giadanot rankedaaliyah/alaya: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. aaliyah/alayanot rankedchloe/khloe: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. chloe/khloenot rankedjasmine/yasmine/yasmeen: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. jasmine/yasmine/yasmeennot rankedhailey/hailee/hayleigh: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. hailey/hailee/hayleighnot rankednicole/nicola/nicky: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. nicole/nicola/nickynot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts), 2013 on the left; every record we hold for Malta 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 Malta

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

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

Over time

Maria/mariahMartinaMaria / Mariah / MarieShaniaMaya2004201194
NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts), 2004–2013 (9 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Locklearsurname●
Billingsgiven name●
Northsurname●
Vellasurname●
Borgsurname●
The best-attested names in Malta, 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

  • NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts)2013headline (given)

    National Statistics Office (NSO), Malta. Counts: residents. given. 25 forms. 2004–2013. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Annual NSO news-release series (top-20 baby boys' and girls' names per year, WITH COUNTS and %% share, sourced from the Public Registry birth records). Variant spellings are grouped in the source (e.g. "Luke / Luca / Lucas") and the grouped string is kept verbatim as the name. Normalized 346 rows covering 2004-2008 and 2010-2013 (continuous; 2009 has no release, ref-year 2014 release News2015_112.pdf excluded due to badly garbled OCR). PDFs behind Cloudflare; fetched via Firecrawl. Source PDFs: News2006_132 (2004-05), News2007_82 (2006), News2009_108 (2007-08), News2012_101 (2010-11), News2014_112 (2012-13). Series last published 2015 for ref-year 2014; World Population Day releases carry no name tables. Distinct from mt-nso-names (rank-only, media-sourced).

    Last verified 2026-06-09.

Sub-national registers

1 register for Malta publishes regional lists only (University of Malta — Maltese surnames, a historical perspective). A regional list is not a national one, and summing regions would be an aggregate the publisher never made, so no figure on this page comes from them.

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 Malta?
Elena/elenia/helena/ella, according to NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts) (2013), with 106 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Malta?
Because they count different people. NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts) (2013) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Elena/elenia/helena/ella. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Sunday. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Malta?
No — 2 are described on this page (Maltese, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Malta”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/MT (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from NSO Malta — "Naming Babies" / "Babies' Names" news releases (top-20 by sex, with counts).