Names of Vanuatu VU

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

Written in bi, English, French.

Population
298K
Official registers
2
BBuilt from 2 official registers, 4 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.

How names work in Vanuatu

3 naming traditions are in use in Vanuatu, 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 Vanuatu

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • Vanuatu Electoral Office — 2020 General Election consolidated candidate list2020not a population count

    Vanuatu Electoral Office (VEO). Counts: election candidates. given and surname. 310 forms. 2020. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Round-5 electoral-roll harvest. Consolidated candidate list for the 2020 General Election; name order GIVEN [MIDDLE] FAMILY (Latin); given=first token, surname=last token; party/constituency/seats dropped; sex is published (Male/Female). See sibling source vu-veo-candidates-2022 for the 2022 Snap Election list. NO LIVE PER-NAME SEARCH FORM FOUND (2026-08-06): vnso.gov.vu does not resolve (defunct/wrong domain — Vanuatu's statistics body is actually the Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics at vbos.gov.vu, which offers only publication downloads and a data-request form, no name search). Vanuatu's civil-registration authority, the Department of Civil Registration and Identity Management (crvsd.gov.vu), was unreachable by every method tried (direct, forced HTTPS, proxied) so its public-facing search capability (if any) could not be verified. The Vanuatu Electoral Office's voter-ID-card reminder is a physical-card check, not an online per-name lookup.

    Last verified 2026-07-25.

  • Vanuatu Electoral Office — 2022 Snap Election consolidated candidate list2022not a population count

    Vanuatu Electoral Office (VEO). Counts: election candidates. given and surname. 277 forms. 2022. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Round-5 electoral-roll harvest, sibling of vu-veo-candidates-2020. Consolidated candidate list for the 2022 Snap Election; name order GIVEN [MIDDLE] FAMILY (Latin); given=first token, surname=last token; party/constituency/seats dropped; this list has no sex column (VEO published sex for 2020 only). 219 candidates, 484 rows. The on-disk copy of this PDF was corrupted (truncated, no PDF trailer) since the original Round-5 harvest; re-fetched clean 2026-08-08 via curl -k (electoral.gov.vu has a broken TLS chain) from the same URL. The companion 2022_snap_election_results.pdf (per-candidate vote counts) is scanned with no text layer and largely overlaps this candidate set — not OCR'd, low marginal value.

    Last verified 2026-08-08.

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 Vanuatu?
No — 3 are described on this page (Bislama and Ni-Vanuatu, British, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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