On this page, we collect information about available personal names data from around the world that can be used for research purposes.
If you would like to add further references to name data, please send an email to Anna.Balbach@tu-dortmund.de.
An overview presentation by our member Gerrit Bloothooft, Utrecht University, Netherlands, can be found and downloaded here: Overview presentation on name data sharing (PDF).
Personal names data for research purposes is available in the following countries at the links below:
Belgium (Flanders/Wallonia)
England and Wales
Germany
German names are not available from official sources for data protection reasons. Private researcher Knud Bielefeld and the Society for the German Language (GfdS) collect the most popular first names and other information on the following websites:
Morocco/Israel
Moroccan Jewish Cemeteries Research Project www.yahasra.org
Yahasra is an Israel-based project documenting Moroccan Jewish cemeteries through a corpus of more than 41,000 burial records, including personal names in Latin and Hebrew scripts. Its public Personal Names Statistics page presents aggregate first-name frequencies by cemetery and burial decade, comparisons between recorded spellings and stored canonical labels, and information about data coverage and methodology.
Statistics are available here: https://yahasra.org/stats/personal-namesDocumented. Aggregate datasets can be provided to interested researchers in CSV or JSON format. The website is available in five languages.
Netherlands
- Dutch data on contemporary given names: Nederlandse Voornamenbank
- Dutch data on contemporary surnames: Nederlandse Familiennamenbank
- Dutch data on historical personal names: WieWas Wie
- Dutch data on historical personal name variants: NAMES corpus
South-Australia
Sweden
- Swedish Name data from the tax agency, incl. name database, toplists on popular first names and surnames, some diachronic and geographical statistics on first namesSweden
Switzerland
- Statistics on first names and surnames in Switzerland (until 2018)
- Surname directory for Switzerland with information on the local occurrence of surnames
- Surnames in German-Speaking Switzerland: the source code for the mapping program of the Atlas of Surnames in German-Speaking Switzerland (Familiennamenatlas der Deutschschweiz – FDS)