Names of Latvia LV
PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) records Jānis as the commonest given name in Latvia; the names that most distinguish Latvia from the rest of the world are Aleksandrs, Andris and Andrejs.
Written in Latvian, Russian.
- Population
- 1.9M
- Official registers
- 2
- Name forms recorded
- 29K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Latvia
6 naming traditions are in use in Latvia, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.
The most common names in Latvia
This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jānis | 44K | 1 |
| 2 | Aleksandrs | 31K | 2 |
| 3 | Sergejs | 20K | 7 |
| 4 | Jeļena | 20K | — |
| 5 | Tatjana | 20K | 68 |
| 6 | Anna | 20K | 71 |
| 7 | Andrejs | 20K | 6 |
| 8 | Svetlana | 18K | 91 |
| 9 | Andris | 18K | 5 |
| 10 | Olga | 17K | 95 |
| 11 | Edgars | 15K | 9 |
| 12 | Irina | 15K | — |
| 13 | Vladimirs | 15K | 25 |
| 14 | Kristīne | 15K | — |
| 15 | Juris | 14K | 11 |
| 16 | Igors | 13K | — |
| 17 | Artūrs | 13K | 10 |
| 18 | Inese | 13K | 34 |
| 19 | Mārtiņš | 13K | — |
| 20 | Viktors | 12K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
18 of PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.
Characteristic of Latvia
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Latvia holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.
Scripts & spelling
Names in Latvia are written in Latin (75%), Hebrew (23%) and Cyrillic (2%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.
Countries whose names look alike
Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.
Registers & sources
Official registers
- PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)headline (given)
Pilsonības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde (PMLP / Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs) counts residents: 114,115 given-name forms, licence Open data Latvia (CC BY 4.0). Last verified 2026-05-10.
Pilsonības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde (PMLP / Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs) counts residents: 108,158 given-name forms. Last verified 2026-06-03.
Cited works
Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.
- How Russian Names Workpaper
- Circassiansencyclopaedia
- A primer on Chechen namesweb
- Behind the Namenamesite
- Chechen languageencyclopaedia
- Chechen Namesnamesite
- Chechensencyclopaedia
- Circassian diasporaencyclopaedia
- Circassian Names (Jaimoukha, oocities)web
- Circassiansencyclopaedia
- Circassians: Kinshipweb
- Crafting Identity: Surnames in the Turkish Republicweb
- Double Surnames Among Circassians in Homeland and Diaspora (Ionov 2024, Voprosy Onomastiki / Avesis)web
- Eastern Slavic naming customsencyclopaedia
- How Russian Patronymics Workweb
- Ingush peopleencyclopaedia
- Ingush submitted surnamesnamesite
- Kabardiansencyclopaedia
- Latvian nameencyclopaedia
- Lithuanian nameencyclopaedia
- Nakh languagesencyclopaedia
- Quora: Russified -ov/-ova names in the Caucasusweb
- Russian given nameencyclopaedia
- Russian surnameencyclopaedia
- Russification of Central Asian namesweb
- Slavic name suffixesencyclopaedia
- South Ossetia Adopts Law On Surnamesweb
- Surname Law (Turkey)encyclopaedia
- Teipencyclopaedia
- The de-Russification of surnames in Central Asiaweb
- Tribal Unions and Clansweb
About this data
Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.
Data snapshot: 2026-10-09.
Questions
- What is the most common given name in Latvia?
- Jānis, according to PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register), with 43,623 bearers recorded.
- Is there one naming system in Latvia?
- No — 6 are described on this page (Baltic, Russian, Ossetian, Uzbek and Russian, Chechen and Caucasian, Circassian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Latvia”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/LV (data snapshot 2026-10-09). Official figures from PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register).