Indonesian Name Generator

How the Indonesian / Malay Name Generator works

Indonesian name generator: where the names come from

There is no such thing as an Indonesian surname, and Malaysia does not have them either. What each region has instead is its own convention, so the generator asks which. The Javanese, the largest group, traditionally use a single name: Sukarno, Suharto and Widodo are complete names, not surnames, and a Javanese passport may have the name repeated to fill the mandatory second field. Modern Javanese give two or three names, but the second is a chosen name and not inherited, so Budi Santoso's son may be Agus Prasetyo. The names are Sanskrit and Old Javanese, Dewi goddess, Sri radiant, Wibowo power, Kusuma flower, Wijaya victory, and the prefix Su- good marks the older generation, Sutrisno, Sulastri, Sugeng. Birth-order names are common, Eko first, Dwi second, Tri third, and the rural names Wati and Ningsih for women, Yanto and Sutrisno for men, are recognisably Javanese.

Malay names, in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and the coastal regions of Indonesia, are Arabic Muslim names with a patronymic: a man is his name bin his father's name, a woman is her name binti her father's, and neither changes on marriage. Muhammad, often abbreviated Mohd, prefixes many men's names as an honorific, Nur light and Siti lady prefix women's, and the fashionable names of the last thirty years, Aiman, Danish, Haikal, Syafiqah, Nabila, Qistina, are drawn from Arabic but often invented in form. The Batak of North Sumatra are the great exception: they have true clan surnames, the marga, inherited from the father and forbidden in marriage within the clan, so that Hutabarat, Siregar, Simanjuntak, Nasution, Lubis and Panjaitan function like Western surnames and Batak Christians pair them with biblical or Dutch given names. The Sundanese of West Java have their own stock, Asep, Dadang, Ujang, Cecep for men and Neng, Euis, Imas for women, and the Bugis of South Sulawesi put the noble title Andi before the name and use Daeng as an address.

Chinese Indonesians were pressed in the 1960s to adopt Indonesian-sounding names, so Tan became Tanuwijaya or Sutanto, and their names appear Javanese with a Chinese echo. For the Sanskrit and Arabic sources, the Indian and Arabic pages; for the neighbouring conventions, the Filipino and Thai pages.

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