girls:
65.6k births since 1905
#489 (91st percentile)
boys:
182 births since 1962
#4404 (4th percentile)
overall:
65.8k births since 1905
#906 (88th percentile)
The name Sonya is the #906 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 65,757 recorded births since 1905. This represents the 88.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 88.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #489 (91.5% percentile) for all time with 65,575 births since 1905. For boys, it ranks #4,404 (3.9% percentile) for all time with 182 births since 1962.
Sonya first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1905 (1905 for girls and 1962 for boys). Birth data for Sonya is available in 117 out of the 119 years between 1905 and 2023 (117 years for girls and 22 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 Sonya has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Sonya reached its peak popularity in 1967, achieving the 84.7% percentile (ranked #114) with 1,736 births per million. The name was most common in 1967, with 1,736 births per million (ranked 84.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1970, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Sonya ranks #845 for girls (10.8% percentile) with 61 births per million, which is 3.5% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sonya reached its peak popularity in 1971, achieving the 2.0% percentile (ranked #654) with 10 births per million. The name was most common in 1971, with 10 births per million (ranked 2.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1988.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sonya".
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 "Sonya", 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 Sonya. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 48.0% confident that Sonya is pronounced as SOH-nyuh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SAH-nyuh, at 28.0% 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 Sonya? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sonya. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sonya, 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 OW1 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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