Names of Tanzania TZ

The names that most distinguish Tanzania from the rest of the world are Juma, Emmanuel and Baraka; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Tanzania are Emmanuel and Saidi.

Written in Swahili, English.

Population
59M
Official registers
6
Name forms recorded
13K
BBuilt from 6 official registers, 12,545 name forms in our corpus, 5 cited works.

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

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Tanzania are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Tanzania included.

How names work in Tanzania

Names in Tanzania follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Tanzania

Characteristic of Tanzania

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Emmanuelgiven name●
Josephgiven name●
Jumagiven name●
Johngiven name●
Ramadhanigiven name●
The best-attested names in Tanzania, 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.

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