Photo by David Herholz/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Babies nap in a hospital nursery, February 2010
The website for Telemundo’s Mun2 channel recently posted an amusing slideshow on the evolution of baby names in Spanish, from old-fashioned traditional names with a religious bent like Encarnación and Guadalupe to English names filtered through Spanish, à la Estefany, Yenifer and Jhonatan.
The slideshow is unscientific fun, but it’s true: While there are still plenty of kids with traditional Spanish names being welcomed into the world in Latin America and the United States, they have been joined by a growing contingent of boys with names like Jhonny (with that spelling, like the Detroit Tigers’ Jhonny Peralta) and girls named Yenifer and Yasmin (as opposed to Jasmine or the Spanish word for the flower, jazmín).
It’s one of those cultural phenomenons that occurs when one culture mirrors another and the reflection turns out not as a mirror image, but rather one shaped by the tastes, colors, and sounds of those doing the mirroring.
As for some of the names in the slideshow that are long out of fashion – like Clotilde – no one will miss them. Welcome, Yenifer.
