Names of Türkiye TR
TÜİK NIP — most used surnames (2025) records Yilmaz as the commonest surname in Türkiye; the names that most distinguish Türkiye from the rest of the world are Ali, Mehmet and Mustafa.
Written in Turkish, Kurdish.
- Population
- 82M
- Official registers
- 4
- Name forms recorded
- 380K
Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Türkiye
2 naming traditions are in use in Türkiye, 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 Türkiye
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alya | 8.7K | — |
| 2 | Defne | 7.7K | — |
| 3 | Gökçe | 7.6K | — |
| 4 | Zeynep | 6.2K | 16 |
| 5 | Asel | 5.9K | — |
| 6 | Umay | 5.6K | — |
| 7 | Asya | 5.1K | — |
| 8 | Elisa | 4.5K | — |
| 9 | Inci | 4K | — |
| 10 | Duru | 3.9K | — |
| 11 | Elif | 3.7K | 23 |
| 12 | Zümra | 3.5K | — |
| 13 | Mihra | 3.5K | — |
| 14 | Miray | 3.4K | — |
| 15 | Lina | 3.3K | — |
| 16 | Eflin | 3K | — |
| 17 | Güneş | 2.9K | — |
| 18 | Ela | 2.9K | — |
| 19 | Meryem | 2.7K | 26 |
| 20 | Eylül | 2.6K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
25 of TÜİK NIP — newborn names'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 Türkiye
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Türkiye 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.
Over time
Up to five names at a time.
Scripts & spelling
Names in Türkiye are written in Latin (97%) and Cyrillic (3%), 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
- TÜİK NIP — newborn names2025headline (given)
Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr counts newborns: 31 given-name forms for 2018–2025. Last verified 2026-06-05.
- TÜİK NIP — most used surnames2025headline (surnames)
Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr counts residents: 30 surname forms for 2018–2025. Last verified 2026-06-05.
Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), nip.tuik.gov.tr counts residents: 30 given-name forms for 2018–2025. Last verified 2026-06-05.
Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK / TurkStat) counts newborns: 100 given-name forms for 1950–2021, licence TurkStat open data. Last verified 2026-05-10.
Sub-national 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.
- The Controversy over Kurdish Naming in Turkeypaper
- Barzani (tribe)encyclopaedia
- Easy Turkish Grammarweb
- Kurdish City & Child Names: The Battle Over Memoryweb
- Kurdish Naming Customsgenealogy
- Kurdish Personal Names: A Sociolinguistic Perspectiveweb
- Kurdish tribesencyclopaedia
- Kylianweb
- Preplyweb
- Surname Law (Turkey)encyclopaedia
- Turkish nameencyclopaedia
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 Türkiye?
- Alya, according to TÜİK NIP — newborn names (2025), with 8,739 bearers recorded among girls.
- What is the most common surname in Türkiye?
- Yilmaz, according to TÜİK NIP — most used surnames (2025), with 1,177,896 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Türkiye?
- Because they count different people. TÜİK NIP — newborn names (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Alya. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Ali. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Türkiye?
- No — 2 are described on this page (Turkish, Kurdish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Türkiye”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/TR (data snapshot 2026-10-09). Official figures from TÜİK NIP — newborn names; TÜİK NIP — most used surnames.