The international baby names arriving on American birth certificates
Every year, when the Social Security Administration releases their list of the top baby names for the year, the story always seems the same. Names like Olivia, Liam, Sam, or other common ones continually top the list. The real story sits farther down the list of the 2025 popular baby name data.
Kasai and Akari were among the fastest-rising boy names, and Alara and Ailanny climbed quickly among the girls. What’s interesting is that nearly all of these names have an international background. ThatsThem took a look at the SSA data, in addition to information from the AARP and the U.S. Census Bureau, to reveal that Americans are increasingly getting their name ideas from abroad.
The naming consensus collapsed
One single name accounting for a quarter of all newborns of one gender may seem impossible today, but it was reality just 50 years ago. Parents were drawing on tradition, which dictated a shared pool of largely Anglo-American options. John, Michael, James, Mary, Linda, and Patricia are just a few of the common options of the time. However, the SSA tracking data shows that this has been a dying tradition nearly every year since the mid-1970s.
As of 2025, the top 10 boys’ names accounted for just about 7.5% of all newborn boys. That’s spread across an astounding list of more than a thousand options that’s continuing to grow. The collapse of traditional naming conventions, combined with immigration and multicultural integration, has opened the door to the exact kinds of names that are topping the list of increasingly popular names.
Which traditions gained
With traditional Anglo-American names chosen less and less, those from other cultures are gaining traction. Irish, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian, and Turkish names are rising in popularity. These five clusters provide a peek at recent naming trends:
The graphic tracks selected names linked to Irish, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian and Turkish heritage from 2015 to 2025. Each panel shows babies receiving those names within the annual top 1,000, per 10,000 SSA-recorded births of the same sex. Separate lines represent boys, shown as blue, and girls, shown as pink.
Each panel uses its own vertical scale. A zero means no selected name reached the top 1,000 that year. It doesn’t mean that none were used. Origin coding remains provisional, and the graphic does not indicate babies’ ethnicity or explain what caused changes.
The post-2020 break
All five of the clusters seemed to move faster after 2020 as a collective, but the individual pacing is a little different. Japanese names didn’t really appear in the top 1,000 at first, but they made a name for themselves in the early 2020s. Turkish boys’ names stayed flat even in 2020, but then saw steady step-ups in the years since. On the girls’ side, Irish and Scandinavian names already had a downward tilt in 2020, but the pace seemed to quicken in the years after, albeit at a slower rate than the rise in the other three clusters.
Where the pattern breaks down
Some of the data can be pretty cleanly attributed to immigration. States that have a large Italian or Scandinavian population, as outlined by the U.S. Census Bureau ancestry files, correlate with the same states seeing name growth via the SSA. Where the pattern gets trickier is in those states where there’s a cluster rising despite a limited standout ancestry or foreign-born population.
The influence in these states likely comes from something besides family heritage. Likely influences include pop culture, famous sports figures, or just the idea of a fresh or unique name.
What the data means
SSA data comes from Social Security card applications. It doesn’t come from birth certificates or ancestry reports. Plus, a name’s origin doesn’t tell you automatically who chose it or why.
What the data does show, however, is which name sounds and spellings are growing. In 2026, it’s best read as a map of individual American taste. People no longer feel confined to only a small pool of traditional naming options and are choosing to branch out to give their children a unique identity in the best way they know how.
Finding the right name for your child
The fact that names like Kasai and Alara are starting to show up more frequently in addition to traditional options like Liam or Olivia doesn’t necessarily mean that Japanese or Turkish communities are suddenly booming. It’s just evidence that the walls between naming traditions have begun to break down amidst natural immigration and cultural integration.
The world has become a far more connected place, and many Americans are inspired by a variety of diverse influences when choosing a name for their child. At the end of the day, though, the best baby name is the one that sounds right, no matter where on the list of top names it falls.
This story was produced by ThatsThem and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
