Name fashion dynamics and social class

Abstract

Modern parents in The Netherlands choose the first names they like for their children. In this decision most follow fashion and as a typical property of fashion, many popular names now have a life cycle of only one generation. Some names show a symmetry between rise and fall of the name, but most names have a more complex behaviour, which can be modelled by multilogistic distributions. These complexities could originate from social classes, that one after another adopt the name. This hypothesis was tested for the female name Femke, which has two more or less distinct popularity peaks centered around 1980 and 2000. The geographic diffusion of Femke did not provide an explanation for the two peaks. And also the names of brothers and sisters of Femke did not point into the direction of different groups of parents with distinct preferences and socio-cultural backgrounds. Since also names of media stars, politicians, or sportswomen do not provide a possible explanation, there still remains a challenge for further research.