Names of Türkiye TR

TÜİK NIP — most used surnames (2025) records Yilmaz as the commonest surname in Türkiye; the names that most distinguish Türkiye from the rest of the world are Mehmet, Mustafa and Fatma.

Written in Turkish, Kurdish.

Population
82M
Official registers
4
Name forms recorded
390K
ABuilt from 4 official registers (2025), 1 sub-national, 389,832 name forms in our corpus, 11 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.

How names work in Türkiye

2 naming traditions are in use in Türkiye, 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 Türkiye

Counts children born in the year · authority tier 1
TÜİK NIP — newborn names, 2025 — 30 given names counted over children born that year, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Alya8.7K—
2Defne7.7K—
3Gökçe7.6K—
4Zeynep6.2K14
5Asel5.9K—
6Umay5.6K—
7Asya5.1K—
8Elisa4.5K—
9Inci4K—
10Duru3.9K—
11Elif3.7K18
12Zümra3.5K—
13Mihra3.5K—
14Miray3.4K—
15Lina3.3K—
16Eflin3K—
17Güneş2.9K—
18Ela2.9K—
19Meryem2.7K24
20Eylül2.6K—

Where the two lists disagree

25 of TÜİK NIP — newborn names's top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

TÜİK NIP — newborn names 2025Across all recordsalya: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. alyanot rankeddefne: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. defnenot rankedgökçe: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. gökçenot rankedzeynep: 4 → 14 · ranks lower across all records4. zeynep14asel: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. aselnot rankedumay: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. umaynot rankedasya: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. asyanot rankedelisa: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. elisanot rankedinci: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. incinot rankedduru: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. durunot rankedelif: 11 → 18 · ranks lower across all records11. elif18zümra: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. zümranot rankedmihra: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. mihranot rankedmiray: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. miraynot rankedlina: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. linanot rankedeflin: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. eflinnot rankedgüneş: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. güneşnot rankedela: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. elanot rankedmeryem: 19 → 24 · ranks lower across all records19. meryem24eylül: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. eylülnot rankedada: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. adanot rankedceylin: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. ceylinnot rankedarya: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. aryanot rankedipek: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. ipeknot rankeddoğa: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. doğanot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
TÜİK NIP — newborn names, 2025 on the left; every record we hold for Türkiye 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 Türkiye

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

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

Over time

ZeynepDefneAselElifAsya2018202514,183
TÜİK NIP — newborn names, 2018–2025 (8 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

Names in Türkiye are written in Latin (97%) and Cyrillic (3%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Mehmetgiven name●
Fatmagiven name●
Mustafagiven name●
Istanbulgiven name●
Ahmetgiven name●
The best-attested names in Türkiye, 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

  • TÜİK NIP — newborn names2025headline (given)

    Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr. Counts: newborns. given. 31 forms. 2018–2025.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 483 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=[]. source note:

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • TÜİK NIP — most used surnames2025headline (surnames)

    Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr. Counts: residents. surname. 30 forms. 2018–2025.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 240 rows, name_types=['surname'], evidence=[]. source note:

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • TÜİK NIP — most used given names2025

    Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr. Counts: residents. given. 30 forms. 2018–2025.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 480 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=[]. source note: CHECKED 2026-08-06: traced NIP's actual client-side calls (POST /Home/EnCokKullanilanIsimler then /Home/GetInformation) and confirmed this portal is hard-capped to the top-30 names by year/sex/province — the page's own text states '...en çok kullanılan 30 tanesi listelenmektedir' — so its in-page search box only filters within that pre-loaded top-30/50 rowset and cannot return a count for an arbitrary name outside it. Also checked biruni.tuik.gov.tr/medas (no name category exposed) and e-Devlet/NVI (turkiye.gov.tr/nufus-ve-vatandaslik-isleri 404; NVI e-Devlet services are self-lookup only, gated by the citizen's own login). No live per-name existence oracle exists for Turkey; NIP and TÜİK remain top-N only, confirming this stub's top_n classification.

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • TÜİK — Statistics on Child (baby names)2021

    Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK / TurkStat). Counts: not recorded. given. 100 forms. 1950–2021. Licence: TurkStat open data.

    What we know about this register

    2021 data from GitHub repo htastan/TUIK-isim (R project). Two XLS files: isim_E (Erkek=M), isim_K (Kadın=F). TÜİK bulletin Excel not bulk-downloadable (JS-rendered portal nip.tuik.gov.tr). Column structure TBD — inspect on fetch.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

Sub-national registers

1 register for Türkiye publishes regional lists only (Bloothooft (2022) — Given names in three generations of Turkish migrants). 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.

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

What is the most common given name in Türkiye?
Alya, according to TÜİK NIP — newborn names (2025), with 8,739 bearers recorded among girls.
What is the most common surname in Türkiye?
Yilmaz, according to TÜİK NIP — most used surnames (2025), with 1,177,896 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Türkiye?
Because they count different people. TÜİK NIP — newborn names (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Alya. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Mehmet. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Türkiye?
No — 2 are described on this page (Turkish, Kurdish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Türkiye”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/TR (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from TÜİK NIP — newborn names; TÜİK NIP — most used surnames.