Kirsty Mckenzie
IT is a big decision – and parents can spend months thinking of names for their children to ensure they make the perfect choice.
Whether you’re considering naming your offspring after family members or picking a traditional Spanish name, there’s always trends in baby names as some come back into fashion while others fade away.
And now pregnancy and parenthood portal Babies and More has predicted the names it expects to be on the rise with new parents in the new year.
Next year’s baby name trends are expected to see an increase in names from foreign countries after the pandemic brought a standstill to travel over the last 18 months.
New parents in Spain are expected to pick names popular overseas, like Italian Enzo, popular UK name Oliver and Thiago, a name very common in Brazil and Portugal. For girls, names like Alba, Alma, Carla, Daniela, Emma and Julia are expected to soar in popularity.
Popular names from 2021, like Adrian, Alejandro, Alvaro, Daniel, Leo, Lucas, Manuel and Pablo are expected to stay trending.
And 2021’s top three girls names, Lucia, Sofia and Martina, are not expected to budge from the top of parents’ lists.
According to their research, Babies and More also predict that Jimena, Maria, Paula and Valeria will trend in the next 12 months.
While all the data from 2021 is still to be released, we do know that the most popular names were chosen by Spanish parents in 2020.
According to the latest data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the top three girl names chosen in 2020 were Lucia which was given to 3,432 babies, Sofia, (3,190) and Martina (3,042). While for boys, 3,313 were given the name Hugo, 3,248 were called Mateo and 3,144 were named Martin.
Lucia has been the undisputed favourite name for baby girls since 2003 when it knocked Maria off the top spot. Maria now appears at number four.
The records show that there are regional differences. In the Basque Country provinces, the most popular names for boys are Markel, Julen, while for girls its Ane, Izaro and Laia.
In the Catalan province of Barcelona, the top names were Marc, Leo and Nil while for girls, Emma, Julia and Martina were the most popular choices.
You can discover the most popular names between 1996 and 2020, narrowed down by each province of Spain, using this interactive map produced by the INE.
Antonio and María Carmen are the most common names in Spain, according to 2020 INE data, more traditional choices in comparison to today’s most popular baby names. The move away from religious and long-established names has been a trend since the 1970s and 1980s.
A total of 655,030 men in Spain are named Antonio and 647,877 women are named María Carmen according to data on January 1 2020.
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