girls:
7.8k births since 1977
#1845 (68th percentile)
overall:
7.8k births since 1977
#3059 (60th percentile)
The name Malaya is the #3,059 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 7,766 recorded births since 1977. This represents the 60.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 60.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,845 (67.7% percentile) for all time with 7,766 births since 1977.
Malaya first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1977 (first recorded for girls in 1977). Birth data for Malaya is available in 43 out of the 47 years between 1977 and 2023. The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
For girls, Malaya reached its peak popularity in 2013, achieving the 43.7% percentile (ranked #525) with 230 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 247 births per million (ranked 42.4% percentile). Despite a peak around 2017, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for girls. Currently, Malaya ranks #645 for girls (31.9% percentile) with 180 births per million, which is 72.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Malaya".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Malaya.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Malaya", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Malaya.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Malaya. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 79.5% confident that Malaya is pronounced as muh-LAY-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is muh-LAI-uh, at 20.5% confidence, with 3 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Malaya? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Malaya. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Malaya, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like M AH0 L EY1 AH0) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker