I recently looked up Wikipedia's list of
popular given names all around the world. It gave a lot of perspective on how "normal" can change depending on where you are. For instance, Mohammad comes out at number 1 in a lot of places due to the muselm population in a lot of areas of the world. By the rule of popularity, Mohammad/Muhammed is a more popular name than Jacob could dream of being in some areas. Even with that information, nobody in America would ever use that name.People make jokes about Mohammed being too sacred to be shown in cartoons or telivision in the US, but it begs to differ against that belief when you see so many people naming thier children after thier prophet. You find other names that people in the US would probably stumble over, but are ubiquetous in some areas.Kazakhstan's #1 name for boys in 2010 was Yerasyl. Seoyeon is the South Korean version of Isabella. Yet mention naming your child these names in American sites and you'd probably get the internet version of the stink eye. It's just too big a world for European names to be the end-all-be-all for "normal".
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