Singh heads list of year’s baby surnames

Ask someone what the most common surname in New Zealand is and invariably the answer is Smith.

But the list of top 10 surnames for babies born in 2019 reveals Smith has been eclipsed.

According to the Department of Internal Affairs, the most common surname for babies born in New Zealand last year was Singh. Smith came in a close second, while another Indian name, Kaur, was the third most common, ahead of Wilson, Williams and Brown.

Across the country, the most common Chinese surname for babies born in 2019 was Wang, back in ninth place.

The Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Jeff Montgomery, said Singh’s emergence reflected immigration trends.

While Singh dominated overall, it was a different story in the South Island where the top four surnames were Smith, Wilson, Brown and Williams.

Singh and Kaur were in fifth and sixth place, respectively.

Massey University professor Paul Spoonley said the figures reflected the dramatic demographic change occurring in New Zealand.

‘‘Between 2013 and 2018 we’ve had the largest net inflow of migrants we’ve ever seen,’’ Spoonley said.

‘‘So 260,000 additional people, and what you see in that period is that the largest group in many of the visa categories is Indian and they are coming here under the skilled visa categories and they are coming as families.’’

New Plymouth Sikh Society member Sunny Singh Grewal said Singh was a common name in the Indian state of Punjab, among Sikhs – ‘‘every Sikh boy gets the name Singh’’.

Grewal said the idea was to throw off the yoke of the caste system, and the surname Kaur served a similar purpose for girls.

He said while he chose to reclaim his caste name and use Singh as a middle name, most Sikhs continued to use Singh as their surname.