‘It’s not even the timeless names that hold steady, like James and Elizabeth.’
Ethan takes fourth spot in V3W, after Armaan, Sahib and Arjun. Armaan and Gurleen are also the top names in Abbotsford’s V2T.
Pav Khangura was one of the Surrey parents who named her son, now 3, Armaan. The family now lives in a Delta neighbourhood where Armaan is the thirdmost popular boy’s name. They, too, wanted something unique.
“We wanted something that was easy to pronounce and it’s obviously Indian. My full name is Pavandeep and his is Manpreet. Typical old-school names, we didn’t want those,” Khangura said. Choosing a name that was pronounced the same in Punjabi and English was the most important factor, she added. “We didn’t realize it was a popular name until after he was born and everyone was like, ‘I know an Armaan.’ ”
What’s old is new
Laura Wattenberg, author of the Baby Name Wizard and creator of babynamewizard.com, said the popular names in the Vancouver area are similar to those in the northern part of the U.S., including where she lives, in the Boston area.
“There’s a kind of ‘new classics’ feeling, especially to the boy’s names, of names that have been common perhaps for the last 40 years, but not before that.”
Some of the names, such as Ethan, Nathan, Benjamin and Daniel, are biblical in origin, but the trend lately is toward Old Testament names because they are less common, Wattenberg said, noting that New Testament names such as John and James are waning in popularity.
“We’re not actually using Bible names any more than past generations, actually less, but we’ve flipped from the classic New Testament names to the Old Testament.”
Boy’s names in North America tend to fall into two distinct groups, Wattenberg said. Neighbourhoods where Alexander, Matthew and Daniel are popular tend to be more international.
“Those are names that are popular in many different countries; they tend to appeal across ages and races. The Ethan, Jayden, Nathan area ... that’s a much more North American-only style that looks to me like it would be a younger parent group.”
As for girls, Wattenberg calls the most popular names in Vancouver “almost humorously consistent.”
“Every one of those girl’s names is a traditional name, it’s an old name, but it was out of fashion for most of the 20th century,” she explained. “Emma was a popular name before that. Others, like Ava and Olivia and Chloe, have never been popular before. They started rising in about the 1980s or ’90s. As a result, parents didn’t grow up surrounded by those names, so they feel fresh, even though they’re traditional.
“It’s not even the timeless names that hold steady, like James and Elizabeth. It’s specifically names that were underused from ... 1930 to 1980. None of them are new, but none of them were common 50 years ago.”
Most of the popular girl’s names in Vancouver “have the sound of today, which is a very smooth sound,” she said.
Celebrity driven? Not so much
In today’s information-saturated and celebrity-obsessed world, it’s tempting to conclude Hollywood must be driving some of these trends, but in fact that was far more true of generations past, Wattenberg said.
“You put all of today’s celebrity babies together and it’s nothing compared to Shirley Temple,” she said. “What’s different is that we’re much less willing to name after someone. You might get the name from somewhere, but parents in the past were totally happy to say that they were naming their daughter after Shirley Temple, thousands and thousands of them, or Judy Garland. Today, the driving goal is to be distinctive and creative.”
Even the oft-cited examples of Ross and Rachel’s baby on Friends driving the spike in Emmas, or more recently, the Twilight franchise producing a glut of Isabellas, were writers picking a name that was already trending, Wattenberg said.
Lucifer? Not a chance
There are certain names that B. C. Vital Statistics will not allow parents to name their children, but for privacy reasons the agency will not disclose these names, Health Ministry spokeswoman Laura Heinze said in an emailed statement.
New Zealand, which has roughly the same population as B.C., regularly releases lists of the names it has banned. Some of the names on the 2013 list included King, Duke, Lucifer, Queen Victoria, Mafia No Fear, Anal and 4real.
No comparable list exists in B. C., but Heinze said while names such as King or Duke would be acceptable here, “the ones that had symbols or numbers in them would not, as would ones that could be harmful to a child, such as Lucifer,” she said, adding that it is “very rare” for a name to be denied.