Malanga
surname · Latin script
Meaning: according to Caracausi, perhaps from malanga ‘tannia’, a tall Caribbean plant of the arum family, with edible pear-shaped tubers, but how this could have translated into a European family name is diff
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/mɑˈɫɑŋɡə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Malanga is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 513K(measured from records)
- UYUruguay1 in 21K
- ARArgentina1 in 406K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 140 (measured from records)
- 1 in 21K (inferred from the name graph)
648 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
according to Caracausi, perhaps from malanga ‘tannia’, a tall Caribbean plant of the arum family, with edible pear-shaped tubers, but how this could have translated into a European family name is difficult to envisage.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Malanga 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 648 | 1 in 513K | 675 | Malanga | 140 |
| UY Uruguay | 158 | 1 in 21K | 158 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 112 | 1 in 406K | 112 | — | — |
| BR Brazil | 111 | 1 in 1.9M | 111 | — | — |
| KE Kenya | ≈23 est. | ≈1 in 2.3M | — | Malanga | 12 |
648 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Malanga is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Any of several Central and South American plants, of the genus Xanthosoma; yautia.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Portuguese, any of several arum family plants grown for their edible tubers: taro, malanga, eddo
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In kmb, Escroto
as a wordDiccionario Portuguez-Kimbundu
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Gerard Malangab. 1943USAmerican photographer and poet (born 1943)
- Corrado Malangab. 1951ITItalian researcher
- Christian Malangab. 1983CDCongolese politician
- Jarzinho Malangab. 2006DEGerman footballer
- Donatella MalangaITresearcher
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 17 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 675 | #32,202 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 668 | #36,101 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 648 | #34,835 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 158 | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 112 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 111 | #58,586 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
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
- What does the name Malanga mean, and where does it come from?
- according to Caracausi, perhaps from malanga ‘tannia’, a tall Caribbean plant of the arum family, with edible pear-shaped tubers, but how this could have translated into a European family name is diff… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Malanga?
- A machine transcription gives /mɑˈɫɑŋɡə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Malanga have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 648 people named Malanga, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled malanga.
- Where is Malanga most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Malanga is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 21 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Malanga?
- In the United States, the national register counted 648 people named Malanga in 2010, about 1 in 513 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Malanga?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/malangaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
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, “Malanga”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.