After the place name analysis, I was curious about human names of Kerala. Name of a person is dependent on the time of their birth. When I was in school, there were 4 Vishnus, and some 3 or 4 Aishwaryas among 200 students.
Why did a name become popular? Who started the trend? When was it trending? When did it become “unfashionable”? Good questions to ask for a name.
Data
To do this, we need names. The only public data available for this is the voters list. I’ve been working on this project on and off for the past 1.5 years. Collecting the data was the most difficult part.
I’ve collected names from the 5 corporations of Kerala: Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kochi, Thrissur, Kozhikode, Kannur.
and the biggest municipality in each of the other districts: Kasargod, Mananthavadi, Malappuram, Palakkad, Thodupuzha, Alappuzha, Kottayam, Thiruvalla.
Important points to note:
- The total names being considered for this analysis is 2,197,000 which is roughly 8% of the voters list population.
- The age in voters list is not entirely correct. My age in the list is still 23 even though I’m 26 now.
- 2025 is set as the base year to calculate birth year from the age.
- Some names have minor spelling differences. This has been rectified. See this file.
- To simplify the analysis, only the top 50 names from each year (separated by gender) were included in the final SQLite database used for this study.
Analysis
Stories
The graph below shows the year on the x-axis and, on the y-axis, the number of people with a given name who were born in that year.
Top 10 names over the years
Aishwarya
The name Aishwarya appears to have gained popularity due to the fame of actress Aishwarya Rai.
Fathima
There was a hit song about a girl named “Fathima” released in 2005. This is the overlap of the song release with popularity of the name.
Note that people don’t necessarily name a baby immediately after birth. In many cases, the official name is finalized at the time of school admission, which is usually around age four. Therefore, this graph may reflect a correlation between the song and name popularity in the years after 2000.
Bindhu & Sindhu
The names Bindhu and Sindhu began gaining popularity in the mid-1960s and became closely associated with each other. Both saw a sharp decline in usage after 1985.
It’s quite likely that the first daughter was named Bindhu and the next one Sindhu 😄.
Baby
A unique naming trend in Kerala was the use of the name “Baby” for both boys and girls. This peaked in the 60s and then gradually faded out.
Check your name
Replace the names in the textbox below to generate comparison graphs. You can also control the year. If this is small in mobile view, open this page separately.
Interactive chart
This interactive chart shows top 10 popular names each year from 1930 (95 years old) to 2007 (18 years old). The chart in the early years is not pretty because there’s less people in that age group in the dataset.
Thanks to Nadieh Bremer for making this interactive chart. I explored several data visualizations of popular names and found hers to be the best.. Since it is open source, I was able to modernize it a bit and put our data in.
This won’t look good if you’re seeing this from mobile. Open this page in landscape mode or better, a computer.
Racing chart
Some names are very popular that it dominated the racing chart for many years. To make it race-chart-worthy, a name is set to have an age of 8 years. This makes the race chart feel more of how your classroom looked like.
Girls
Boys
I later realized that Muhammad was actually the most common first name in my classroom, but students usually had another name to distinguish them. For example, someone’s official name might be Muhammad Raheez, but we would simply know him as Raheez.
Muhammad is also the most common first name in the world, and that trend is reflected here as well.
Further analysis
More analysis can be done with this data. I’ve been working on this project for over a year now, and I’m honestly exhausted 😭. If you notice any interesting patterns or have ideas for further analysis, please let me know in the comments!
You can download the SQLite DB here. All source is on git: https://github.com/subins2000/kerala-baby-name-analysis
You can put this SQLite database into ChatGPT or Gemini and ask questions too.
Technical notes
- Nadieh Bremer made that interactive chart in good ol’ JavaScript of 2013. No transpilers, no npm, just a simple HTML page with <script> tags. Because of this, I was able to easily run and modify it locally.
- Like in the previous place name analysis, the SQLite DB is loaded in the webpage
Query used for Baby graph in graph generator:
SELECT
id,
CASE
WHEN gender = 'M' THEN 'Baby Boy'
WHEN gender = 'F' THEN 'Baby Girl'
END AS name, gender, year, count
FROM humans WHERE name = 'Baby' ORDER BY year;
Do you know the reason behind your name? Let me know in the comments!