The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen has won the unfortunate accolade of being the first Federal State in Germany in which the Arabic name Mohamed is now the most popular for newborn boys.

Whilst Maximilian, Paul and Alexander were 2017’s most popular boy’s names for Germany as a whole, Bremen’s babies have a distinctly Islamic flavour. Mohamed is officially the state’s most popular baby name – despite being a lowly 68th in Germany as a whole.

This reflects the demographic trends of Bremen. As of 2015, 16% of the State’s population were foreign nationals, whilst 29.4% were of a non-German ethnic origin.

Mohammed is already the 3rd most popular baby name in Vienna, whilst totalling up the variants of the name in England places it at the helm of most popular name for newborn boys.

And whilst the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache explains that the name Mohamed has seen a ‘rapid rise in popularity’ in recent years in Germany, a report by Die Welt suggests that the variants of Mohammed added together would have made the name the 5th most popular in 2014 – prior to Germany admitting 4 million mostly Muslim immigrants.

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