Njala

surname · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Njala is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Poland than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Famine; hunger.

rarermore common
  • PLPoland1 in 19M(measured from records)

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.

Poland (measured from records)

2 people, 2026

Sources
4 (measured from records)

Reference-verified

1 in 19M (inferred from the name graph)

Poland

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Famine; hunger.

Sources 1

  • The African book of names

Where in the world(measured from records)

Njala 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.

Where Njala is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
PL Poland21 in 19M2——
IN India———Njala2
IS Iceland——2——
NG Nigeria——listed——

2 people counted by dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames), 2026. 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: dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Njala is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Njála

19 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Njala is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Finnish, nyala, Tragelaphus angasii

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In se, inflection of njallat:

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In xbr, to be wrong

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In tum, famine

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Nyanja, hunger

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 4 sources across 2 countries.

Official registers attesting Njala
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20262—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—2#372,443

Reference works 1

  • 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

What does the name Njala mean, and where does it come from?
Famine; hunger. Recorded by The African book of names.
In which country does Njala have the most bearers?
In Poland, the national register counted about 2 people named Njala, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Njala most common?
Njala is densest in Poland, where the national register counts about 1 in 19 million people carrying it.
How common is the name Njala?
In Poland, the national register counted 2 people named Njala in 2026, about 1 in 19 million residents.

What do you want to know about Njala?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/njala

The same 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), 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, “Njala”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Njala parses inside a full name →