girls:
39.4k births since 1906
#681 (88th percentile)
boys:
44 births since 1938
#4542 (1st percentile)
overall:
39.5k births since 1906
#1247 (84th percentile)
The name Sonja is the #1,247 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 39,459 recorded births since 1906. This represents the 83.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #681 (88.1% percentile) for all time with 39,415 births since 1906. For boys, it ranks #4,542 (0.9% percentile) for all time with 44 births since 1938.
Sonja first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1906 (1906 for girls and 1938 for boys). Birth data for Sonja is available in 112 out of the 118 years between 1906 and 2023 (112 years for girls and 7 years for boys). 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.
The name Sonja has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.9% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Sonja reached its peak popularity in 1967, achieving the 71.5% percentile (ranked #211) with 778 births per million. The name was most common in 1938, with 979 births per million (ranked 69.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Sonja ranks #888 for girls (6.2% percentile) with 37 births per million, which is 3.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sonja reached its peak popularity in 1973, achieving the 0.6% percentile (ranked #640) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1973.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sonja".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Sonia. View all variations of Sonia.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sonja", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 7 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Sonia" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Sonia..
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Sonja. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 62.5% confident that Sonja is pronounced as SAH-nyuh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SOH-nyah, at 15.0% confidence, with 2 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 Sonja? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sonja. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sonja, 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 S AA1 N Y 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.
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