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.

Recently been using ActiveRecord + SQLite a LOT, so making this post for the basic template.

Gemfile

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "activerecord", "~> 8.0"
gem "pry"

gem "sqlite3", "~> 2.4"

playground.rb

require 'active_record'
require 'pry'
require 'sqlite3'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  adapter: 'sqlite3',
  database: 'db.sqlite3'
)

class Place < ActiveRecord::Base
end

@first_run = !Place.table_exists?

# Create the table (migration-like setup)
if @first_run
  ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
    create_table :places do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.string :lat
      t.string :lon
      t.timestamps
    end
    add_index :places, :name, unique: true
  end
end

binding.pry

Update

After this post was published, some people asked for some other suffixes to be analyzed. I've now made an interactive webpage to analyse place names in any way with SQL:

Intro

I noticed something unique when I walked around in Kakkanad, some of the local place names ended with the word "മുഗൾ".

I haven't heard of any other place having this suffix in Kerala before, so it was quite interesting to me. The curiosity instantly brewed in my mind, is this really specific to Kakkanad? Why so?