En 2019, nearly 600 Arya were born… and 750 Marie. As the former increases and the latter decreases, Ned Stark’s daughter will soon be more popular than Jesus’ mother. Game Of Thrones would have replaced the Bible? Not completely, and not quite.
Let us go back a few centuries. When first names stopped being passed on, a world opened up for parents. Now a choice had to be made. How to do ? Take example from those of famous or prestigious parents, duchesses or notaries, holders of good taste. It was choosing safety. Take support from novels or plays. It was sometimes showing cultural heresy, taking fiction as a guide … even if the author of Paul and Virginie he himself named two of his children Paul and Virginia. More recently, films, serials, television series have offered a rich, varied, diverse, international body from which to draw at will.
Lea vs Leïa
But let’s take, in Star wars, GoT and Harry Potter, all the first names invented or absent from the choices of French parents before the distribution of these works… Greedo, Darth, Oberyn, Cersei… The proportion of babies bearing these first names is very low today: at most, 6 babies out of 1 000 were so named in 2019. Sirius: a handful. Greedo: we’re still looking for them. Lannister? It’s not even a first name. The few hundred Anakins born since 1980 represent only a tiny minority of births, and Leia’s greater success does not come close to the now more classic Léa.
Not the new Bible, then. But a little still: the parents filter. In the maternities there are no more Mehujael and Meraioth than there are Gellert and Alastor. Parents choose, select, spot and reject. To have a small success, a first name must already resemble a first name. The wave of Arya and Leia was prepared by Aya, Ana, Assia, Léa or Maïa. When the distance is too great with the taste of the day, the transplant does not take.
Baptiste Coulmont is professor of sociology at the Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, author of Sociology of first names (La Découverte, 2014, 130 p., 10 €) and, with Pierre Mercklé, from Why supermodels don’t smile. Sociological chronicles (Presses des Mines, 2020, 184 p., € 29).