Popular Baby Names in North Africa: Algeria and Tunisia (Official Data)

Anyone who tries to compare baby name rankings across North Africa runs into a problem straight away: the countries do not publish the same kind of data. One gives counts for a single year, another gives the order of names over a whole decade. Some publish no official ranking at all. This article brings together the official data available for Algeria and Tunisia, and says plainly what each figure is. Where there are gaps, we have not filled them with guesses.

First, the data report card

This table is the key to everything that follows. When a name is "number one" in Algeria, that refers to a ten-year period; in Tunisia, to babies registered in one year. The two countries' ranks can sit side by side, but one cannot be read as the other.

Algeria: the top 10 of each decade

Algeria's Ministry of the Interior published the 10 girls' and 10 boys' names most often given to newborns in each ten-year period from 1970 to 2020; the list was reported by the newspaper El Bilad in 2022. The ministry gave no numbers of babies and no lists for individual years. Below we use the two most recent periods, 2000–2010 and 2010–2020 (labelled as the ministry labels them).

Girls, 2010–2020

Boys, 2010–2020

The change between the two periods is striking. Among girls only 4 names (Aya, Maryam, Malak and Khadija) appear in both lists; 6 names, including Ikram (إكرام), number one in 2000–2010, are outside the newer top 10. 6 new names took their place, and for half of them (Ritaj, Aseel, Sirine) we could not find a clearly attested meaning in reliable sources, which the table says openly. The boys' list is steadier: 6 names are in the top 10 in both periods. Among the names in the top 10 in both periods, the biggest jump belongs to Adam, from 9th to 1st, while Muhammad moved from first to second. Because no counts were published, these are changes in rank only; we cannot tell how wide the gaps between names are.

One more feature of the boys' list: 6 of the 2010–2020 top 10 are names of prophets (Adam, Muhammad, Yusuf, Ayyub, Yunus and Ishaq). Ahmad, too, is known as one of the names of the Prophet Muhammad.

Tunisia: the clearest list, with numbers

The most detailed official data in the region comes from Tunisia. The National Institute of Statistics (INS), working from civil registers, published the top 10 girls' and boys' names for 2022 births together with the number of babies given each name. In 2022, 71,807 girls and 76,171 boys were registered in Tunisia. The top three:

We cover the full Tunisian lists, the 2020–2022 comparison and the regional differences in our separate articles on Tunisian girls' and boys' names. We found no newer INS list for 2023 or later.

Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan: no verifiable official ranking

For Libya we found only a press report of a statement on the 2019 statistics, which we could not verify against an official publication, so we have not used it. As far as we could find, the competent authorities in Morocco, Egypt and Sudan do not publish a ranking of newborns' names. Egypt's statistics agency reports births by governorate, not by name. "Most popular names" lists and figures circulating online for these countries are not based on official registers, so we have not used them. A top 10 table for these countries would be an invented table.

Names that cross borders

Using a script, we compared Algeria's two decade lists with Tunisia's 2022 top 10. 3 girls' names and 5 boys' names appear in the lists of both countries:

The figure in brackets in the Tunisia column is the number of babies given the name in 2022. Muhammad is in Algeria's top two in both periods and 5th in Tunisia in 2022. Keep the different periods in mind when reading the table: 3rd place over a decade and 1st place in a single year are not on the same scale. The table is not a league table but a map of a shared taste in names.

The Abjad view

We calculate the Abjad value from the letters of the name's established Arabic spelling: a shadda is not counted twice, a hamza seat is counted as written, a hamza standing on its own (ء) has no value, and the round ta (ة) counts as ha (5). Compound names such as Abdulrahman are counted in full as written (عبد الرحمن, 405).

• Element of the first letter: in Algeria's 2010–2020 list, 5 girls' names and 7 boys' names begin with a Fire letter. The reason is simple: all of them start with alif or mim. Among girls, Earth and Water have two names each and Air one; among boys, Air has two and Earth one. (Some authors classify the letters' elements differently.)
• Extremes: the highest girls' value is Khadija (622), just ahead of Ritaj (614); the lowest is Aya (16). Among boys, Abdulrahman is highest (405) and Iyad lowest (16).
• Same number, different name: from Algeria's 2010–2020 list, Aya (آية) and Iyad (إياد) are both 16. Algeria's Malak (ملاك) and Tunisia's Lina (لينا) are both 91.
• When the spelling changes: ماريا is 252, مارية 256; ملاك is 91, ملك 90. Zakariya stays the same in both spellings, زكرياء and زكريا: 238. No spelling is luckier than another; what matters is the spelling the family will actually use.

Aya and Iyad sharing a number makes the point: a value on its own is not an analysis. In the Abjad tradition, what counts is how the name's letters and elements relate to the mother's and father's names. The baby's yıldızname sign is also calculated from the baby's name together with the mother's name. Two children with the same name produce different pictures in different families.

This article is for information only. Abjad interpretations are based on tradition and contain no definitive judgement or guarantee about any name.

Sources: Algerian Ministry of the Interior, most common names by decade 1970–2020 (reported by El Bilad, 2022; no counts). Tunisia National Institute of Statistics (INS), "Most common names" publication (2022 births, 29 December 2023); figures are the numbers of babies given each name among births entered in the civil register. No verifiable official name ranking was found for Libya, Morocco, Egypt or Sudan (October 2026).