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
BBuilt from 2 official registers, 28,528 name forms in our corpus, 31 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Latvia are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Latvia included.

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

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2

This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.

PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) — 114,115 given names counted over residents.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Jānis44K1
2Aleksandrs31K2
3Sergejs20K7
4Jeļena20K—
5Tatjana20K68
6Anna20K71
7Andrejs20K6
8Svetlana18K91
9Andris18K5
10Olga17K95
11Edgars15K9
12Irina15K—
13Vladimirs15K25
14Kristīne15K—
15Juris14K11
16Igors13K—
17Artūrs13K10
18Inese13K34
19Mārtiņš13K—
20Viktors12K—

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.

PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)Across all recordsjānis: 1 → 11. jānis1aleksandrs: 2 → 22. aleksandrs2sergejs: 3 → 73. sergejs7jeļena: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. jeļenanot rankedtatjana: 5 → 68 · ranks lower across all records5. tatjana68anna: 6 → 71 · ranks lower across all records6. anna71andrejs: 7 → 67. andrejs6svetlana: 8 → 91 · ranks lower across all records8. svetlana91andris: 9 → 59. andris5olga: 10 → 95 · ranks lower across all records10. olga95edgars: 11 → 911. edgars9irina: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. irinanot rankedvladimirs: 13 → 25 · ranks lower across all records13. vladimirs25kristīne: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. kristīnenot rankedjuris: 15 → 1115. juris11igors: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. igorsnot rankedartūrs: 17 → 10 · ranks higher across all records17. artūrs10inese: 18 → 34 · ranks lower across all records18. inese34mārtiņš: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. mārtiņšnot rankedviktors: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. viktorsnot rankedmāris: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. mārisnot rankedludmila: 22 → 132 · ranks lower across all records22. ludmila132dmitrijs: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. dmitrijsnot rankedinga: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. inganot rankedvalentīna: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. valentīnanot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) on the left; every record we hold for Latvia on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

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.

The best-attested names in Latvia, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

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

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.

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).