Alas, Poor Yorick, I Knew Him Well!
The Brussels Journal makes the astounding claim that the "most popular name for newborn boys in Brussels, the 'capital of Europe,' in 2005 [is] Mohamed, followed by Adam, Ayoub, Rayan and Mehdi". Naturally reading claims like that forces a double-take, but following the link to the Belgian statistics page shows he is quite right. Yasmine, Aya and Rania aren't doing too badly in the girls department either.
| Rang | Meisjes | Rang | Jongens | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voornaam | Aantal | Voornaam | Aantal | |||
| 1 | Sarah | 112 | 1 | Mohamed | 206 | |
| 2 | Lina | 90 | 2 | Adam | 105 | |
| 3 | Yasmine | 72 | 3 | Ayoub | 76 | |
| 4 | Aya | 71 | 4 | Rayan | 75 | |
| 5 | Rania | 71 | 5 | Mehdi | 73 | |
| 6 | Imane | 63 | 6 | Ilias | 65 | |
| 7 | Clara | 60 | 7 | Lucas | 62 | |
| 8 | Emma | 58 | 8 | Zakaria | 59 | |
| 9 | Inès | 55 | 9 | Nathan | 58 | |
| Laura | 55 | 10 | Nicolas | 57 | ||
Nieuwsflits n°79 Overzicht van de populairste voornamen van baby's in 2005
posted by wretchardthecat at 12/07/2006 06:58:00 PM
11 Comments:
So, are immigrant female names much less uniform than male names, or is there some removal of females from the ranks of the newlyborn?
There's been nothing new about this for some time. The same has been true even for the area around Nice (France, Cote d'Azur) for several years now.
Richer, more educated and influential Europeans don't feel their lifestyle is threatened by this (it's actually underwritten by the cheap household help so much immigration makes possible). Ordinary Europeans, who are really frozen out of any political say by their 'betters', just hang in there focusing on their holidays and their pensions.
ADE wrote, "It could, of course, be that the idigenes have greater variety in their names, thus reducing the popularity of any one of them."
Before you can pick a baby's name, you have to flush the condoms, birth control pills, morning-after pills, abortion referrals, and actually carry a baby to term. Europe is turning into a giant Seattle, where the yuppies set aside park after park for their beloved dogs but frown on moms with baby strollers (who are usually out-of-towners) for contributing to overpopulation.
In Egypt, at least, Ahmed (or Ahmad) is a significantly more common name than Muhammad. I don't know about other Islamic countries. Does anyone have a good idea what Ahmed's absence from this list signifies?
Sammler,
I was about to say "wain Ahmed" ("where is Ahmed" in Arabic)?
In the UAE, in a crowd of guys yell "Ya Mohd" and half will turn their heads, yell "Ya Ahmed" and the other half turns their heads.
wretchard,
Your Xenophobia is showing.
I try to take what you write seriously but you do yourself a disservice when you take a region in Brussels that contains only 10% of the population on .53% of its land surface and you point out that the most popular babies name is Mohamed. Is this a representative of your understanding of the use of statistics in analysis?
Here's a list on the top ten names in Bahgdad last year.
Boys:
1. George
2. Dick
3. Donald
4. Colin
5. Scooter
6. Areil
7. Jeb
8. Leo
9. Moqtada
10. Joe
Ash:
When you're the canary (Wretchard) in the coal mine, that's not xenophobia -- that's called doing your damn job.
What . . . when it reaches 35% of the population, will that suffice for you? Has your statistical sophistication ever contemplated trends?
Cedarford,
Using such a small sample area and babies first names as a variable to project larger demographic trends is absurd. There are any number of explanations for the name Mohammed to be the first choice. Dense populations...slum...place where new immigrants tend to settle maybe? New immigrants, sunni in particular, chose Mohammed over all others. Tons of reasonable explanations to describe that result aside from the conclusion that "MUSLIMS ARE A DEMOGRAPHIC TIME BOMB ENGULFING EUROPE!!"
Take a look at the boys' names for the whole of Belgium in 2005. There are about 30,000 boys bearing the top 100 names. Of these about 1,000 have Muslim names (Mohamad, Ilias, Mehdi Rayan). I assume half the Adams are Muslim.
That means about three per cent of baby boys are Muslim if the distribution of names outside the top 100 is the same as inside it.
For what it's worth, according to the Social Security files, Mohamed was number 475 in the U.S. list of most popular names for newborn boys in 2005.
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