According to data released by the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache (Society for the German Language), the most popular boy’s name for newborn babies in Berlin is Mohammed.
Mohammed ranks first as the most popular name for newborn boys in the German capital once all the variations of the name, such as different spellings like Muhammed and variations like Mehmet, are counted together, German tabloid Bild reports.
The name has also become very popular in Bremen, where it ranks in third place for newborn boys behind Ben and Elias.
However, while Mohammed is the most popular name for children in Germany’s urban capital, it failed to make the top ten in terms of popular names across all of Germany.
The top five most popular names across Germany for boys were Paul, Alexander, Maximillian, Elias, and Ben.
According to the GfDS, there are around 65,000 current first names in use in Germany, explaining that even the most popular name of Paul was only given to one in 76 children born last year.
Despite not being in the nationwide top ten, the name Mohammed has seen a dramatic rise according to the GfDS report for 2017 which showed that, within a single decade, Mohammed had gone from the 97th most popular baby name to the 24th.
Other countries in Europe that have seen recent waves of mass migration show similar changes, such as neighbouring Austria — where Mohammed was the 3rd most popular boy’s name in 2017.
In France, Mohammed was revealed to be the most popular baby boy’s name in the heavily migrant-populated suburbs of Paris, according to statistics released by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) last September.
In the United Kingdom the name has been the most popular in England and Wales for six straight years according to a report released in September, as well by the British government.