Names of Papua New Guinea PG

Names in Papua New Guinea are recorded in English and ho, with a given name followed by an inherited family name.

Written in English, ho, tpi.

Population
7.3M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
3
BBuilt from 1 official register, 3 name forms in our corpus, 3 cited works.

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

How names work in Papua New Guinea

2 naming traditions are in use in Papua New Guinea, 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 Papua New Guinea

Scripts & spelling

Frustersurname●
McJunkinssurname●
Spelinasurname●
The best-attested names in Papua New Guinea, 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.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • PNG Election Results Database — candidate names (1972–2022)not a population count

    Development Policy Centre, Australian National University (Terence Wood). Counts: election candidates. given and surname. 11,521 forms. Licence: Research use only; cite Wood 2025 (not official results).

    What we know about this register

    18,437 unique candidate full names across all PNG national elections 1972–2022 (ANU cross-year standardised-name field). evidence='exists'; count = number of distinct election appearances (weak signal, max 11). Sex from ANU female flag (M 17,826 / F 611). Person-name roster, not a population frequency table. Some honorifics retained in names ((Sir)/(Dame)). Citation: Wood, Terence (2025), PNG Election Results Database.

    Last verified 2026-05-28.

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 Papua New Guinea?
No — 2 are described on this page (Papua New Guinean and Melanesian, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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