Names Part 1: Near Future

Reminder for near future sci fi writers: if your story is set like 50 years from now, and your characters are adults, they will have names like Brooklyn and Castiel. If your characters are teenagers, their parents will have names like that. - Shared Memory From Sept. 19, 2016

Disclaimer: The following post is based almost entirely on the US and could be wildly wrong for anywhere else. Please take with 325mg of salt.

I made this post over a year ago, and in retrospect Brooklyn seems to have been something of a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. That's a little sad for me, because I like the name, but I digress. To understand the concept we're exploring today, you need to start with two basic facts.

1. In the US, about 75% of people have names that are in the top 1000 for the year they were born. Since 75% of everyone is way more than 1000 people, that means that even names below the Top 100 will belong to a lot of people, and feel like normal names to people who have them or are of an age group with those who do. (As an aside, if I ever hear someone suggest that Stephanie was a "rare" name in the 1920s again, I'm going to throw something. It was like 128th whatever year Steve Rogers is supposed to have been born. There were plenty of Stephanies. Not as many as there were Stephens, or even Steves, but it wouldn't have sounded odd to anyone.)

2. Your idea of what constitutes a "normal" name is heavily informed by the year you were born. This is a little less true if you mostly grew up around Catholics, because of the rule about needing the name of a saint somewhere in there. (I know that rule isn't like, universally observed, but it has a certain norming effect nonetheless). If you grew up in the 20th or 21st century (and if you grew up before that, please email me, I'd like a word), you encountered two groups of names while your languagebrains were still squishy. Those of your immediate age peers, people within at most 5 years of your own age, and those of your parents, probably the generation immediately before yours, although obviously some people's parents are from the one before that, or the other end of their own. That's going to be your default for what normal is, especially your age peers, because you probably interacted with a lot more of them. Someone 5 years younger or older than you has a slightly different sense of what is a normal name. Someone twenty years older or younger than you might have a totally different one.

So let's talk about that thing where 75% of people have names in the top 1000 for their birth year. If your name is anywhere in the top 10, you were likely Jennifer S. or Connor Y. for at least a year in elementary school. If your name is in the top 100, you likely had a nickname to differentiate you from the other 5 or 6 of you at your high school. (I went to a high school of about 300 people. We had 8 Alexes and 8 Megans, not counting an Alexandria who didn't go by Alex.) If your name is in the top 1000, you probably didn't get strange looks or asked to spell it, unless it was a Zack/Zach situation. If you're in the 25% of people without top 1000 names, you're unusual, although obviously unusual is relative and whether you're a Shiloh or a Z'ev depends as much on where you live as exactly how rare your name is. (No, I don't know how to pronounce Z'ev.)

Anyway, this has Implications for near-future sci-fi and, to a lesser extent, any young adult fiction in contemporary settings. Most name trends are cyclical, so in the far future you can do whatever you want, and obviously in second world fantasy none of this is likely to apply. But if your story is set between 2025 and 2070, and you have teenagers or young adults named Jennifer, it's going to feel very strange. (That's not an arbitrary example. There were fewer Jennifers per capita born in 2016 than in any year since 1945, and its popularity shows no signs of picking back up). Obviously there's some room for having teenage Jennifers in the mid-late 21st century, because naming trends are not absolute commandments. But it's pretty common to see near future sci-fi written by Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers where, due to an entirely reasonable desire to avoid weird, made up names, everyone is called Jennifer or Amy or Natalie, and it just sounds wrong, unless there's a reason for it. (If your dystopian government feels that human civilization peaked in the 1950s, it is not at all unreasonable to have all your characters have names that were popular in the 1950s). 

Figure out roughly when your characters were born, and if it's a past year, look up what the most popular names were and extrapolate accordingly. If they were born in the future, look at patterns and try to extrapolate. Month names tend to be popular one at a time, so was 2045 a time for Aprils? Junes? Was it perhaps a time for Septembers or Februarys? Names associated with scandal and bad things tend to lose popularity for a while and pick it back up eventually, at a rate proportional to the severity and how strongly the person's first name was connected with it. There probably won't be a lot of Adolfs yet in the 2020s, and I doubt there will be many Donalds either, but we might start seeing more Monicas again. In the US, names from countries we were recently at war with also see a substantial dropoff. (The popularity of the name Adolf actually started to decline after World War One). 

This is actually also something to consider in second-world fantasy with a large cast. If you have more than 50 named characters subject to the same naming conventions, you will probably have some characters with the same name. Consider which names are common and why. If there are named historical figures, won't some people from the same place or culture be named after them? Depending on the size of their influence, might characters in *other* cultures be named after them, with differences in pronunciation and spelling depending on language differences? Actually, names in second-world fantasy really ought to have their own post.