Names of Zambia ZM

The names that most distinguish Zambia from the rest of the world are Phiri, Sakala and Zulu; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Zambia are Mary and Phiri.

Written in English, bem, Nyanja.

Population
17M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
1.8K
BBuilt from 2 official registers, 1,832 name forms in our corpus.

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

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

How names work in Zambia

3 naming traditions are in use in Zambia, 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 Zambia

Characteristic of Zambia

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Zambia 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.

MargretMaryAgnessIsaacBeatriceGraceEstherMercyJamesBlessingsConstancePetronellaNaomiGetrudeJaneDanielJuliusJudithEmmanuelHaward
Sized by how much of the difference between Zambia's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.(measured from records)

Scripts & spelling

Phirisurname(measured from records)
Zulusurname(measured from records)
Zambiasurname(measured from records)
Sakalasurname(measured from records)
Marygiven name(measured from records)
The best-attested names in Zambia, 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

  • ECZ 2021 Councillor Elections — candidate results2021not a population count

    Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) counts election candidates: 2,716 given-name and surname forms for 2021, licence Open government data. Last verified 2026-07-02.

  • Zambia top-100 surnames (surnam.es)not a population count

    surnam.es (third-party) lists 100 surname forms. Last verified 2026-06-05.

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

Is there one naming system in Zambia?
No — 3 are described on this page (Bemba, Chewa and Nyanja, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Zambia”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/ZM (data snapshot 2026-10-09).