Guten Tag! 1.9 German first names

We have met a number of German first names in this chapter. But which are the ones that we are most likely to meet in everyday life? In 1997, sixteen researchers at the "Kulturbox" in Berlin collated the frequency of first names in the Berlin telephone directory. Click here to see the full list. The top twenty male and female names from their survey are listed below:

These are probably names which the outsider would recognise as "typically German". Yet recent years have seen parents choosing quite different names for their children. According to the German Language Society (GfdS), the ten names most commonly given to babies in 2006 and 2007 were as follows: