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Irish baby names in the US, 1880 - 2015

6/15/2016

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The data used is the same as in the previous post. This time I'm looking specifically at parents giving their children Irish names. To begin I need to define what I mean by Irish names. I am looking for names that derive specifically from Irish culture, mythology and the Irish language. Names like John or Emma may be popular in Ireland but they are not Irish names. I did not include the names Padraig (Patrick), Sean (John) or Seamus (James) as these names are gallicised  versions of non-Irish names. I used a list of the top 100 baby names in Ireland for 2014 and extracted Irish names from that list. The names are:

female names:
Aoife, Caoimhe, Saoirse, Ciara, Niamh, Roisin, Clodagh

male names:
Conor, Rian (Ryan), Oisin, Cian, Darragh, Cillian, Fionn, Finn, Eoin, Aidan, Declan

Occurrence of the names in 1880:

There were no occurrences of any of the names in 1880.
By 1920 the name Ryan appears (this is an Anglicised version of Rian so is not strictly Irish). 
By 1950 the Irish version Rian has appeared, but still no other names.
By 1975 the names ​Ciara and Conor and Aidan had appeared.
By 1980 the list had grown to include, Cian, Finn, Eoin, Declan, Niamh and  Roisin
By 1990 the name Darragh appeared. So by 1990 most of the male names in my list had appeared. Oisin and Fionn were still missing. About 60% of the female names had also appeared.
All of the remaining names had appeared by 2010.

Summary:
So all these Irish names can now be found in the US although they are not common. Most of them appeared between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s.
Given that these names can be difficult for English speakers to pronounce I am a little surprised that they all appear in the US lists.

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