The Baby Names That Are Far More Common in Michigan Than Anywhere Else
Mahdi is the most distinctively Michigan name in America, with 55% of every American Mahdi born there. Hussein follows at 46% and Hadi at 30%. Michigan produces 2.77% of US births but claims an outsized share of Arabic names, a pattern rooted in the Detroit area’s Arab American communities — the largest and oldest in the country.
| Name | Sex | Michigan lift | MI births | US births | Expected at national rate | MI's share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mahdi | M | 20.0x | 149 | 269 | 7 | 55.4% |
| Hussein | M | 16.5x | 149 | 326 | 9 | 45.7% |
| Hadi | M | 10.9x | 105 | 347 | 10 | 30.3% |
| Leen | F | 7.7x | 65 | 306 | 9 | 21.2% |
| Malak | F | 7.0x | 84 | 431 | 12 | 19.5% |
| Yasmeen | F | 6.3x | 58 | 332 | 9 | 17.5% |
| Yazan | M | 5.8x | 83 | 520 | 14 | 16.0% |
| Henrik | M | 5.5x | 138 | 906 | 25 | 15.2% |
| Layan | F | 5.4x | 154 | 1,027 | 28 | 15.0% |
| Kenan | M | 5.1x | 81 | 569 | 16 | 14.2% |
| Reem | F | 5.0x | 71 | 513 | 14 | 13.8% |
| Ali | M | 4.9x | 710 | 5,189 | 144 | 13.7% |
What does it mean for a name to be “distinctively Michigan”?
It means concentration, not popularity. We compared each name’s share of Michigan births from 2021 through 2025 against its share of births nationwide, then ranked the gap. A lift of 10× means the name turns up ten times more often in Michigan than in the country at large. Names needed at least 50 Michigan births and 250 nationally to qualify.
Michigan is a large state, at 2.77% of US births, which makes these figures harder to achieve than they look. A 20× lift in a state this size represents a much larger group of families than the same figure would in Montana or Hawaii.
Which baby names are most distinctive to Michigan?
Mahdi leads at 20 times the national rate, with 149 Michigan boys against an expected seven. Hussein follows at 16.5×, Hadi at 10.9×, Leen at 7.7×, and Malak at 7.0×. Eleven Michigan names exceed five times the national rate.
The largest name on the list by volume is Ali, with 710 Michigan boys over five years — 13.7% of the national total. Hassan adds another 217. These aren’t rare names nationally; Michigan simply has far more of them than population alone would predict.
Dearborn and the surrounding Detroit suburbs have long held the highest concentration of Arab Americans of any US city, with communities tracing to Lebanese, Yemeni, and Iraqi immigration across more than a century. Michigan’s naming data reflects that history more clearly than almost any other public dataset.
Why does Henrik appear on this list?
Because Michigan has a second naming tradition, unrelated to the first. Henrik sits at 5.5× with 138 Michigan births, and it comes from the Dutch and Scandinavian settlement of western Michigan — the region around Holland and Zeeland, named by 19th-century Dutch immigrants who established communities there.
It’s a smaller thread than the Arabic one, but it’s real, and it puts Michigan alongside Minnesota and Pennsylvania as a state where two or more naming vocabularies show up in the same top twenty.
Which Michigan names are rising and which are fading?
Ali is at a record high — 157 Michigan boys in 2025, its best year in the data. Hassan has climbed from 34 in 2012 to 58. Mahdi has gone from 20 to 33, and Layan from 10 girls to 35. Hussein is the exception, down from a 2002 peak of 45 to 20 last year.
| Name | 2012 | 2016 | 2021 | 2025 | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ali (M) | 129 | 125 | 123 | 157 | Rising, at record high |
| Hassan (M) | 34 | 37 | 40 | 58 | Rising |
| Layan (F) | 10 | 19 | 30 | 35 | Rising |
| Mahdi (M) | 20 | 15 | 23 | 33 | Rising |
| Henrik (M) | 12 | 33 | 36 | 25 | Peaked in 2018 |
| Hussein (M) | 34 | 27 | 31 | 20 | Declining |
Michigan’s Dutch-Scandinavian thread peaked in 2018 and has slipped since, mirroring what happened to Minnesota’s Scandinavian names over the same period. The Arabic names are still climbing.
Are Michigan’s most popular names also its most unusual?
No. From 2021 to 2025, Michigan’s most common names were Noah, Oliver, Theodore, Charlotte, Henry, and Liam — the national top ten, lightly reordered. Michigan’s distinctiveness lives below that tier, though Ali at 710 births comes closer to the mainstream than most names in this series.
How does Michigan compare to other states?
Michigan has eleven names above 5× lift, putting it behind only New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Mississippi for depth. What sets it apart is doing that at scale: Michigan is the largest state in this series apart from New York, and large states normally regress toward the national average.
The closest parallel is Minnesota, where East African names dominate the distinctiveness ranking. The communities differ, the naming vocabularies differ, and the two states arrived at the pattern through entirely separate histories — but the shape in the data is strikingly similar.
Where does this data come from?
The figures come from the Social Security Administration’s state-level baby name files, which record every name given to at least five babies of one sex in a state in a given year, drawn from Social Security card applications. The records run from 1910 through 2025. We analyzed 2021 through 2025 and required at least 50 state births and 250 national births for a name to qualify.
Two caveats. Names given to fewer than five babies in a state-year are suppressed. And the files record where a baby was born, not where the family lives now.
Source: Social Security Administration — Baby Names by State
Analysis covers births 2021–2025. Published September 2026.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only. Information and conditions are subject to change. Verify current details directly with the relevant source before making any decisions.
