Kotani
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kotani is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 1.7M(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 1.6M
- ARArgentina1 in 2.5M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 82 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.6M (inferred from the name graph)
199 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kotani counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
199 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Henry Kotanib. 1887JPFilm director and cinematographer (1887–1972)
- Masao Kotanib. 1906JPJapanese physicist
- Tsugunobu Kotanib. 1935JPJapanese screenwriter (1935-2020)
- Hiroyuki Kotanib. 1942JPJapanese historian
- Maoko Kotanib. 1965JPJapanese announcer
- Tomoko Kotanib. 1968JPJapanese seiyū
- Ken Kotanib. 1973JPJapanese historian
- Kinya Kotanib. 1979JPJapanese singer
- Yuki Kotanib. 1991JPJapanese association football player (1991-)
- Riho Kotanib. 1994JPJapanese singer
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 14 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 253 | #11,976 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 199 | #92,358 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 191 | #89,895 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 183 | #104,276 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 164 | #20,361 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 135 | #50,347 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 18 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #270,770 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #169,679 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- In which country does Kotani have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 199 people named Kotani, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kotani.
- Where is Kotani most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kotani is densest in Brazil — about 1 in 1.6 million people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kotani?
- In the United States, the national register counted 199 people named Kotani in 2010, about 1 in 1.7 million residents.
What do you want to know about Kotani?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kotaniThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Kotani”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.