Names of Namibia NA

Names in Namibia are recorded in English and Afrikaans, with a given name followed by an inherited family name.

Written in English, Afrikaans, German.

Population
2.6M
Official registers
5
Name forms recorded
87
BBuilt from 5 official registers, 87 name forms in our corpus, 11 cited works.

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

How names work in Namibia

5 naming traditions are in use in Namibia, 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 Namibia

Characteristic of Namibia

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Shikongosurname●
Angulasurname●
Cloetesurname●
Hilmagiven name●
Nangombesurname●
The best-attested names in Namibia, 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

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 Namibia?
No — 5 are described on this page (Afrikaans, German, Romansh, Luxembourgish, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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