This is the most common surname in South Africa
Before you look, can you guess the most common last name in South Africa?
As a country with 12 official languages and numerous cultural and ethnic groups, it might not be easy to guess the most common surnames in South Africa.
Because of the vast demographics of our beautiful country, it actually makes for quite an interesting question: out of all the groups of people, which surname is the most common?
Luckily, today there are online resources that can quickly answer this question for us.
Forebears is a genealogy portal that hosts a dictionary of surname meanings, including information on their geographic distribution.
This portal also includes “a geographically indexed and cross-referenced directory of sources for family history research”.
“The main aim of the site is to bring together the wide variety of genealogical sources available online and offline and catalogue them so as to make them easily accessible to researchers looking for records relating to ancestors in a particular town, region or country,” says the official website.
Forebears also gives people access to see the most common names and surnames in different places around the world, among other useful features.
The most common surname in South Africa
According to the site, they know about 821,426 unique surnames in South Africa.
And the most common one out of all of them is, according to Forebears, Dlamini.
Here are the top 50 most common surnames in South Africa:
- Dlamini – 310,094
- Nkosi – 300,929
- Ndlovu – 281,656
- Khumalo – 273,217
- Sithole – 216,358
- Mahlangu – 215,528
- Mokoena – 209,762
- Mkhize – 173,326
- Mthembu – 171,793
- Zulu – 165,568
- Ngcobo – 163,802
- Gumede – 163,265
- Naidoo – 153,887
- Buthelezi – 149,129
- Khoza – 143,494
- Sibiya – 133,461
- Jacobs – 130,364
- Govender – 129,771
- Mofokeng – 129,329
- Botha – 128,008
- Mhlongo – 126,648
- Smith – 125,534
- Baloyi – 124,602
- Mbatha – 121,567
- Pillay – 121,424
- Radebe – 119,966
- Mathebula – 114,416
- Ntuli – 113,766
- Zwane – 112,699
- Mazibuko – 111,243
- Tshabalala – 110,309
- Nxumalo – 107,776
- Van Wyk – 106,985
- Williams – 106,885
- Chauke – 103,812
- Ngwenya – 103,436
- Cele – 102,346
- Van der Merwe – 100,825
- Mthethwa – 99,131
- Dube – 95,974
- Ngobeni – 93,651
- Pretorius – 89,359
- Ngubane – 89,112
- Maluleke – 89,002
- Maseko – 87,560
- Du Plessis – 86,080
- Molefe – 85,700
- Mtshali – 85,146
- Mabaso – 84,533
- Nel – 84,016
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