How baby names are changing in Türkiye
An eight-year reading of the official newborn-name records TÜİK publishes for 2018–2025, covering 483 national name-year rows and 13,093 provincial rows across 81 provinces. ParentSide did the comparison; TÜİK published the counts.
Key findings
01
The country's most-given name is not the most-given name in most of the country
ALPARSLAN was the most-given boys' name nationally in 2025, yet it was the most-given name in only 31 of 81 provinces — GÖKTUĞ led in 28. The girls' map splits the same way: ALYA led 32 provinces and GÖKÇE led 31. Across the country 9 different girls' names and 11 different boys' names were first somewhere.
Metric: Provincial rank-1 counts, 2025. Rank 1 is never truncated by the province cap, so these are exact.
02
ALPARSLAN made the largest rank move in the dataset
ALPARSLAN went from rank 30 in 2018 to rank 1 in 2025, a gain of 29 places — the largest movement by any name ranked at both ends of the period. On the girls' side ALYA rose 19 places, from 20 to 1.
Metric: Rank at 2018 minus rank at 2025, for names present in the top 30 in both years.
03
Half the girls' top 30 is new since 2018; the boys' list barely moved
16 of the 30 girls' names in the 2025 top 30 were not there in 2018, and 16 names present in 2018 have gone. The boys' list turned over 9 names in each direction. Over the whole period 53 distinct girls' names held a top-30 place at some point, against 39 boys' names.
Metric: Set difference between the 2018 and 2025 top 30, counted separately in each direction. No rank is imputed for a name outside the list.
04
The leading name is much smaller than it used to be
ZEYNEP was given to 14,183 girls in 2018. In 2025 the leading girls' name, ALYA, was given to 8,739 — 38% fewer. The top three's share within the published top 30 barely moved over the same period, so this is a smaller leader rather than a measurably flatter distribution.
Metric: Absolute counts of the rank-1 name by year, and the top-3 share within the observed top 30. Annual birth totals are not in this dataset.
05
Boys' names are markedly more stable than girls' names
19 boys' names held a top-30 place in all 8 years, against 14 girls' names. The boys' list had 2 different names at rank 1 across the period; the girls' list had 4.
Metric: Count of names ranked in every year, and distinct rank-1 names by year.
Most-given names, 2025
Eight-year trajectories, 2018–2025
Boys · Biggest risers / Biggest fallers
Girls · Biggest risers / Biggest fallers
Biggest risers · Biggest fallers
Entered the top 30 since 2018 · Left the top 30 since 2018
Girls
Entered the top 30 since 2018 (16)
Gökçe #3, Umay #6, Elisa #8, İnci #9, Mihra #13, Lina #15, Eflin #16, Güneş #17, Ada #21, Ceylin #22, Arya #23, İpek #24, Doğa #25, Mira #27, Masal #29, Sare #30
Left the top 30 since 2018 (16)
Ebrar #4, Hiranur #6, Zehra #9, Azra #13, ECRİN #15, Yağmur #16, ESİLA #18, Öykü #19, Damla #21, Eslem #24, Derin #25, Nisanur #26, Melisa #27, Ayşe #28, BELİNAY #29, Hira #30
Ranked in all 8 years
Girls compared with boys
| Metric | Girls | Boys |
|---|---|---|
| Ranked in all 8 years | 14 | 19 |
| Entered the top 30 | 16 | 9 |
| Left the top 30 | 16 | 9 |
| Distinct names ever ranked | 53 | 39 |
| Distinct names at rank 1 | 4 | 2 |
| Names first in at least one province | 9 | 11 |
Regional variation
İBRAHİM HALİL is a regional name, not a national one
İBRAHİM HALİL appears in the published newborn lists of just 3 provinces (GAZİANTEP, KİLİS, ŞANLIURFA), reaching rank 6 in one of them, with at least 435 births recorded. It holds no national top-30 place at all.
Names that are common everywhere and ranked nowhere
AHSEN was recorded in the published lists of 68 provinces with at least 1,536 births, and YAĞIZ in 64 provinces with at least 1,720 — neither appears in the 2025 national top 30. A name can be widely used and still sit below a list that stops at thirty.
The provincial picture is split, not uniform
In 50 of 81 provinces the leading girls' name was something other than ALYA; for boys the figure is 51. Two names dominate each map, and the rest of the country divides among a handful of others.
What this data cannot tell you
The national series stops at thirty
TÜİK publishes the top 30 names per year per sex and nothing below it. A name absent from these tables is not unpopular — it is simply outside a short list. Nothing here should be read as evidence that a name is rare.
Province lists are cut by rank, not by size
Each province's list also stops at rank 30. In İstanbul that cut still sits in the hundreds of births, so a name can be common in a province and absent from its list. Every provincial total on this page is therefore a floor, written as "at least", and no province figure should be treated as a complete count.
Counts move with the birth rate
The number of children born in Türkiye changed over this period, and this dataset does not contain annual birth totals. Absolute counts therefore cannot be converted into shares of all births, and a falling count is not by itself evidence that a name became less favoured. Shares quoted here are shares within the published top 30.
Movement in and out of the list is censored
When a name leaves the top 30 its rank stops existing in the data. This analysis never assigns a substitute rank: names ranked in both 2018 and 2025 are compared directly, and names that arrived or left are counted separately.
Origin is an editorial classification, not a TÜİK field
TÜİK records no language of origin. Where origin appears here it comes from ParentSide's own sourced taxonomy, built primarily on TDK's Kişi Adları Sözlüğü, and it describes the language a name comes from — not the identity, beliefs or intentions of the parents who chose it.
This data does not explain itself
The records show what names were given and how often. They contain nothing about why. ParentSide publishes the measurements and stops there; any account of the reasons behind them would be ours to invent, not TÜİK's to support.
Methodology
This analysis uses records taken from the TÜİK Nüfus İstatistikleri Portalı dataset "En Çok Verilen Bebek İsimleri" on 2026-08-29. The national series contributes 483 name-year rows; the provincial series contributes 13,093 rows across 81 provinces. The raw records are kept exactly as retrieved and verified by checksum, so every figure here is reproducible from that archive. Rank movement is computed only for names ranked at both endpoints, no rank is imputed for a name outside the list, and provincial totals are floors.
Data source
Sources and updates
- Last updated:
The counts are TÜİK's. The comparison, the calculations and the interpretation boundaries on this page are ParentSide's. ParentSide does not own TÜİK's data and is not affiliated with TÜİK.