Naming Traditions Around the World: How Different Cultures Name Children

Naming traditions are usually served as trivia — a ceremony here, a curious ban there. This guide treats them as systems: each with an order, building blocks, a moment of naming, and sometimes a state watching. Every custom below carries its nature — law, custom, or religious practice — and its date where it matters, because half the errors in this genre come from presenting a nineteenth-century habit and a current statute as the same kind of fact. The world’s naming traditions disagree about almost everything except this: a name is never only a name. Carry one lesson from these naming traditions into any registry office: the form is young, the custom is old.

The order question: which name comes first

Custom — Across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, the family name leads: the family is the constant, the individual its newest member. Europe mostly runs the other way, with one famous exception — Hungary, one of few European languages to put family first. Law — Japan made the point officially. Under an inter-ministerial agreement dated 25 October 2019 (following a 2000 language-council recommendation), Japanese names in official documents are written family-name-first in Roman letters too, effective 1 January 2020. The scope matters: government documents; private habits did not all turn on the same day. Some naming traditions put the family first, some the child, some the calendar — each order is an argument about belonging. Naming traditions survive governments because they answer a question governments cannot: who is this child to us?

Building blocks: how names are assembled

Custom, backed by law — Spain. A Spanish name is a given name plus two surnames: the father’s first surname, then the mother’s. Women do not change their names at marriage. Since 1999 parents may transpose the order, and since June 2017 father’s-first is no longer the legal default — parents must sign an explicit agreement on which surname leads. Tradition barely noticed: the old order is still chosen in 99.53% of cases. Portugal runs the mirror image: several surnames, usually the mother’s first, with the father’s last — and last is the indexing one.

Custom — Russia’s patronymic engine. Between given name and surname sits a generated third element: the father’s name reshaped — -ovich for a son, -ovna for a daughter (Ivan → Ivanovich/Ivanovna; Dmitry → Dmitrievich/Dmitrievna).
Law and custom — Iceland. Icelanders mostly have no family surnames to inherit, because the patronymic (or matronymic) is built fresh each generation: Jón’s daughter is Jónsdóttir, his son Jónsson, a child of Katrín equally Katrínarson. Adopting a fixed family name has been illegal since 1925 unless one is inherited — directories run by given name.

Custom — the Arabic structure stacks up to four layers: the kunya (Abu or Umm — “father of,” “mother of” — plus the eldest child’s name), the given name, the nasab chain (ibn/bint, “son/daughter of,” sometimes generations deep), and the nisba, of place or tribe. Modern legal names use fewer. Law draws the opposite line in Indonesia, where names are not legally divided into given and family parts — Sukarno and Suharto were complete legal names in one word (Batak clan names excepted). Where naming traditions meet modern registries, the registry usually wins on paper and the tradition wins at home.

Names the system assigns: the calendar and the generation

Some names are not chosen so much as issued. Custom — Ghana’s day names. In the Akan system every child receives a “soul name” (kra din) from their weekday of birth, often a lifelong first name. The complete set, boy and girl: Sunday Kwasi / Akosua, Monday Kwadwo / Adwoa, Tuesday Kwabena / Abena, Wednesday Kwaku / Akua, Thursday Yaw / Yaa, Friday Kofi / Afua, Saturday Kwame / Ama. (Neighbouring Ewe names differ; do not merge them into this table.) A Ghanaian introduction can carry a birth certificate inside it.

Custom — China’s generation character. Traditionally, one character of the given name is shared by every sibling and paternal cousin of a generation, its sequence set by a lineage poem composed centuries ago — dozens or hundreds of characters, recycled when it runs out. The honest currency check, from academic sources: once popular, and still somewhat common. Korea’s dollimja works the same way.

Custom — Thailand issues a second name instead: the chue len, a nickname given at birth and used in nearly all daily life, while the long, Sanskrit-derived legal name stays on documents. Plain nicknames like Moo (“pig”) and Kob (“frog”) are the everyday reality. A traveller through these naming traditions notices the same ceremony in different clothes: the community gathers, the name is spoken.

Muslim naming: practice, in its own terms

Religious practice — Singapore’s official mufti office (MUIS) summarises the newborn rites: the adhan in the right ear, the iqamah in the left; and a seventh-day cluster — the child named, the head shaved (the hair’s weight given in charity as silver), and the aqiqah performed, two animals for a boy and one for a girl, the hadith joining all three to that day. Before the naming comes tahnik: a softened date — date, not honey — touched to the palate.

One widespread summary gets the timing wrong, and the sources correct it: naming on the seventh day is attested, but so is naming on the first — the Prophet named his son Ibrahim on the night of his birth. The seventh day is a honoured pattern, not a deadline. Meanings carry real weight here: the teaching in Sahih Muslim calls ‘Abd-Allah and ‘Abd al-Rahman the most beloved of names to Allah — Abd- names mean “servant of” plus a name of God — and a hadith in Abu Dawud urges the names of prophets. The modern classification of names as directly Quranic, root-derived, or Islamic-but-not-Quranic is a modern classification — useful for checking, not classical doctrine; the Muslim name generator explains it in full. In Pakistan, academic research traces “Muhammad” moving from names’ end to their front after 1965. Keep the labels in mind as the naming traditions unfold — what is law in one country is mere custom across the border.

Ceremonies, and the deadlines nobody celebrates

Religious practice — Hindu namakarana is held after the tenth day, classically on the eleventh, twelfth or sixteenth, the name’s first syllable drawn from the child’s birth star (nakshatra). (Other ranges quoted online conflict with the reference works.) Jewish practice names a boy at his brit milah on the eighth day, and a girl, in Ashkenazi custom, at a synagogue Torah reading on a Shabbat — girl-welcoming ceremonies (simchat bat) are a 1970s creation. Christian practice gives a saint’s name at baptism; today’s Catholic canon law (Can. 855) bars only names “foreign to Christian sensibility” — baptism never was the legal registration.

Japan separates two events often conflated: oshichiya, the seventh-night announcement of the name, and omiyamairi, a shrine visit around a month later, at which the name is presented rather than given. Korea’s baekil, the hundredth day, is not a naming ceremony at all — it celebrates an infant’s survival.

Law then imposes its own calendar: Japan’s family register within 14 days; Germany’s registry within one month; Denmark, a name before six months. The ceremony is the family’s; the deadline is the state’s. That is the honest pleasure of naming traditions: they show how many ways humans have found to say you are one of us.

When the state says no

France — law, 1993. Since the Law of 8 January 1993, parents choose freely and the registrar records the name at once; only if a name appears contrary to the child’s interests does the registrar escalate — to the State Counsel, and potentially to a family judge. Iceland — law: since 1991 a Naming Committee keeps an approved register, testing new names against the Icelandic alphabet and grammar; its 2019 update removed the gender condition and admitted -bur for non-binary children. Denmark — law runs an approved-list system (outside names need agency approval); published counts of that list disagree wildly, so this guide cites the system, not a number. Germany has no list: the registry reviews each name for recognisability and harm, and the old expectation that a name declare the child’s gender is softening.

New Zealand — law lets the Registrar-General decline offensive, excessively long, or title-like names. Its disclosed 2025 refusals are a small monarchy of ambition: King eight times, Prince seven, Princess six, Justice four, Lucifer once The famous case is older — in 2008 a Family Court judge made a girl whose name (“Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii”) was never even registered a ward of the court for renaming, calling it a social disability. Beyond the Anglosphere the record needs care: Mexico’s famous banned list is one state — Sonora, in 2014 reporting — barring sixty-one names found in its own registers; Saudi Arabia’s widely copied list exists as 2014 press reporting attributed to the interior ministry, not an official publication. China’s constraint is practical: names must use ID-readable characters.

Two systems in one family

For families naming across a border, these traditions stop being exhibits and become negotiations. A name must survive reversal by foreign forms (family-first into given-first), carry a patronymic tradition into a surname world or the reverse, and sometimes hold two names at once — as Thai and Ghanaian children already do. The practical lesson: decide which system you are naming in before falling in love with a name inside the other one. The country name generator is organised by those systems.

Frequently asked questions

Why do Spanish speakers have two surnames?
Because it records both lines: the father’s first surname, then the mother’s — a system still governed by living law, as the building-blocks section above sets out.

Why does the family name come first in Japan?
By long East Asian custom — formalised by Japan even for the Roman alphabet, in official documents from 1 January 2020 (agreement of October 2019), as set out above.

Do Muslims have to name a baby on the seventh day?
No. The seventh day carries the aqiqah cluster and is a honoured pattern, but naming on the day of birth is attested in the same sources — the Prophet named his son Ibrahim the night he was born.

What are Ghanaian day names?
Names issued by the weekday of birth — the Akan child’s “soul name,” often a first name for life. A boy born on Friday is Kofi, a girl Afua; all seven pairs are listed above.

Which countries can refuse a baby name?
More than most parents expect: Iceland through a naming committee and register (since 1991), Denmark through an approved list, France through registrar referral to a judge under its 1993 law, Germany through registry-office review, New Zealand through a Registrar-General who publishes refusals. The systems differ; the principle — the child’s interest outranks parental novelty — does not.

Can a name be fine in one country and refused in another?
Yes — names travel; rules do not. “King” is an unremarkable English surname and a refused given name in New Zealand (eight refusals in 2025). A diaspora child’s name must pass two tests: the culture that gives it meaning, and the registry that gives it legal existence.

Systems with reasons

Every tradition here answers a question — who is this child, whose are they, what do we hope, what will the record allow? A naming system is never a curiosity; it is a family’s theory of identity, compressed into the first word a person is ever given.