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Choosing a name for a Swedish baby

Registration with Skatteverket after the birth
Choosing a name for a Swedish baby
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP / Unsplash
Last updated/verified: December 2024

Registering a newborn

There’s not much to do in terms of registration when a baby is born in Sweden. The midwife notifies Skatteverket, and the mother gets a form from them a few days after the birth. The full name for the child should be put into the form, and then the form is sent back to Skatteverket. A few days later the child officially stops being a nameless personnummer.

If the parents are not married (but are sambor, for example), there’s some additional bureaucracy to register the father of the child. You can use the digital service here:

Notify us that you have become a parent
What you need to know and do if you become a parent

More information from Skatteverket in English:

New parents
Information for new parents

Skatteverket also registers the child's citizenship. The child gets a Swedish one if one of the parents has it (even if that parent dies).

Names

For integration

We learned from our Swedish friends that Swedes often have three first names, one of which is their preferred/official one (tilltalsnamn). We have also learned from the internet that names ending in 'y' and English names can be seen by some Swedes as trashy. Then again, “Alice” was the most popular name for baby girls born in both 2019 and 2020. I suppose it’s not that English?

If you really want to blend in, you can use SCB and Skatteverket. SCB (Statistics Sweden, a government agency), used to produce the reports about the stuff like most popular boy and girl names for newborns in a particular year.

Namnstatistik
Från och med 2024 slutar vi producera namnstatistik. För dig som vill ha statistik om namn i Sverige hänvisar vi till Skatteverket.

Starting in 2024, Skatteverket took this over.

Namn på nyfödda
Här hittar du statistik över namn på nyfödda barn.

According to the report from 2023, people in the Stockholm region liked to call their kids Olivia, Selma, Oliver, and Noah, while Norrbotten was more into Alma, Alice, Alfred, and Leo.

For special cases

The form you send to Skatteverket is actually an application which can be refused. A first name can’t be offensive or too similar to a last name or unsuitable for some other reason (that’s not me being vague, that’s me translating “eller vara olämpligt som förnamn av någon annan anledning”). This law applies to all the children living in Sweden with a Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian or no citizenship. It also applies to children with Swedish citizenship living in Finland, Denmark or Norway. If the child has a citizenship other than those mentioned above, you can apply for a name that follows the laws of their country of citizenship.