Looking at some name data

[redbird]

The New York City Health Department has released its list of most popular names for girls and boys in 2010. They break it down by ethnicity. The official categories here are Hispanic, Black, White, and Asian & Pacific Islander. My first thought was that the list doesn't look much like what I think of as "Hispanic" names: the only clearly Hispanic boys' name, Angel, is after Jayden and Justin and above Jacob and Christopher. Then I got to White.

For girls:

• Esther

Olivia
Leah
Sophia
Emma
Rachel
Isabella
Sarah
Chana
Ava/Chaya

And for boys:

Joseph
David
Jacob
Michael
Daniel
Moshe
Benjamin
Matthew
Alexander
Jack/Samuel

The New York Times story that linked me to this talked about the frequency of Blblical names, and boys' names starting in J, but that list doesn't just look "Biblical" to me, it looks Jewish. Esther, Leah, Rachel, Sarah, Chana, Chaya, not any form of Mary (nor is Maria on the list of names given to Hispanic girls). Either a very large fraction of the white children being born in this city right now are Jewish, or nobody's going to be able to tell a Jewish name from a non-Jewish one ten years from now. Some of both, I suspect: Leah and Hannah have been pretty high in the national lists of girls' names in the last few years. Not Ann(e) or Anna, Hannah. (I was going to offer my grandparents' names to a friend who was looking for suggestions of what to name a baby, a few years ago, but my friend's "nothing in the top ten" request ruled out my grandmother's name; she was Mia, short for Amelia.)

At my job, we are sometimes asked to write practice questions in the form "$name is doing an experiment/has discovered" rather than talking about "a student" or "a scientist" or "a team." We try to come up with a mix of plausible names, of various ethnicities. What does "Hispanic name" mean when the list of names for Hispanic girls starts "Isabella, Mia, Emily, Sophia, Ashley"? (I tend to use are statewide data, for the year and state in question: the Social Security Administration is happy to give out, say, top ten names for girls born in West Virginia in 2002, or boys in Mississippi in 1993, or anything back about a century, though they note that the data are spotty pre-1937, which isn't a problem for our purposes. Having the list rather than pulling things out of the air at least means it's less likely to read like "these are old people" to the kids using the book, which it might if I started thinking of my friends.)

I don't know what, if anything, this means,

Comments

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I hadn't looked at the lists broken down by ethnicity (mostly because I saw the headlines and thought "Jayden? Really, people?") but I don't think we can deny that among those we now identify as white, the more conservative Jewish families tend to have the highest birth rates, at least in the city. Plenty of people are now staying here to have kids, rather than move to the suburbs--but it's awfully rare to find anyone with more than two kids unless they are religious, and most people I know think one kid is plenty. Pretty much every one of my parenting coworkers is parenting a singleton (unless they unexpectedly had twins, which did happen to one colleague), whether the kid is 1 year old or looking at colleges.

Also, while they obviously serve all comers, Maimonides in Brooklyn delivers more babies than any other hospital in New York State. I am not sure how much of that is due to the hospital's maternity resources and popularity, but it must have something to do with the significant Orthodox population which is physically close by.

Edit: Actually, that makes me wonder about something. Do they change the names in textbooks depending upon which region of the US the books are being sent to? Because we always had books with names we thought made little sense. And if so, how much sense would it make to name everyone Esther or Chana--do yeshivas tend to adopt mainstream US textbooks?

[redbird]

Textbooks in general, maybe not. But my company is specifically marketing books aimed at state-specific tests (what Common Core standards will do to our market we're not entirely sure yet, but science is lagging math and reading on those). We also try to find either locally relevant or broadly known examples: a book for anywhere may refer to the San Andreas Fault, but a Chesapeake Bay example is more likely in a Virginia book than an Alabama one. (That's even when the state doesn't explicitly require coverage of local natural resources or the history of local geologic formations: Louisiana gets more on the Mississippi delta than Illinois does, because they test the students on it. Everyone gets the basics of erosion and deposition, but examples and amount of coverage vary.)