Names of Indian origin in American births

Which names with a sourced Indian-language origin American parents actually use, how that has changed, and where in the country they cluster. Counted from Social Security birth records, not from name-meaning lists.

The total has roughly doubled, against a falling birth rate

In 1980, 4,434 American babies were given a name this site can source to an Indian language, spread across 246 distinct names. In 2025 it was 18,175 births across 439 names.

Births under these names are 4.10 times the 1980 level, across 45 years, and the count of distinct names is 1.78 times it. Births grew faster than the number of names, so the growth is concentrating into names that were already in use rather than arriving as new ones. As a share of all recorded births the total went from 0.129% to 0.548%, a 4.3× move in the share itself. That last figure is the one to weigh: it is measured against all US births, which have been falling, so a rising share is a real change in what parents choose and not an artefact of more babies.

One caveat on reading this column. A handful of these names entered English generations ago and are now used by families of every background, so the total is not a count of Indian-American families. It is a count of births under names whose origin is sourced to an Indian language. The per-name table below is where the individual movements are visible.

The names themselves

Ordered by births in 2025.

By language of origin

• Sanskrit 496 names
• Hindi 148 names
• Bengali 80 names
• Malayalam 51 names
• Gujarati 46 names
• Urdu 32 names
• Telugu 21 names
• Marathi 18 names
• Tamil 17 names
• Punjabi 10 names
• Kannada 6 names

Where these names cluster

States where Indian-origin names take the largest share of births, over the last ten years.

The same names in England and Wales

ONS publishes every name given to three or more babies, which makes the England and Wales figures a useful second reading on the same question.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How a name gets classified — and what that misses

A name is labelled Indian-origin only when a source says so. Of the 2,445 names carrying a label here, 930 come from an English Wiktionary entry filed under a given-name-from-language category or from a Wikidata language statement. The remainder come from a native-script Wiktionary given-name entry whose own transliteration matches the spelling, and those are reviewed by hand before a page is published: 0 have been reviewed so far.

The gaps are worth stating plainly. Wiktionary's coverage of Indian given names is uneven — Sanskrit and Hindi are well represented, Malayalam and Kannada are thin — so a name genuinely in use may carry no label at all and simply not appear on this page. Transliteration is lossy in both directions: a Malayalam entry romanised one way may be spelled another on an American birth certificate, and those pairs are missed. And a name's linguistic origin says nothing about who chose it. None of these gaps are filled by guessing.

By Alex Ninan. Method and formulas in full on the methodology page.