Name Generators by Culture, Language and Era

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What the section covers

Every culture builds names differently, and the differences are the point. A Spanish name carries two surnames, one from each parent. An Icelandic name has no surname at all, only a patronymic that changes every generation. A Chinese name puts the family first and the given name second, and a Ghanaian name often records the day of the week the child was born. A Russian name has a patronymic between the first name and the surname, and the surname itself changes its ending for a daughter. The pages here reproduce those structures rather than just supplying a list of first names and a list of last names, so the output reads as a name from that culture and not as an English name with foreign parts.

How the names are built

Each page carries name lists drawn from the common stock of the culture and a set of patterns that assemble them in the right order with the right connecting pieces. Where a language writes in another script, the page shows the romanised form alongside the native one: characters with pinyin for Chinese, kanji with kana for Japanese, hangul for Korean. Where names are gendered, a gender select chooses the list; where a culture has distinct regional or linguistic traditions inside it, such as Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa in Nigeria or Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi and Bengali in India, the page has a select for those too.

The historical pages

The historical pages follow the conventions of their period. The Roman page builds a praenomen, nomen and cognomen; the Old Norse page attaches a patronymic and a byname; the medieval page picks from the English, French and German name stock of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries with occupational and locative surnames; the Victorian and decade pages draw on the names that were actually popular in those years, so a 1920s name and a 1980s name sound like they belong to different people.

Handled with care

Some naming traditions, including Native American names, are not a free stock of words to be recombined. That page explains how the conventions actually work and produces respectful, generic results rather than the stereotype tables that circulate elsewhere.

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