Probably influenced by the sound of Maya, Naya is an elaboration of Nia. This is a Swahili name meaning ‘purpose, aim’ that came to the US in the 1970s.
Nia is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Nia isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Nia ranks 458. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Nia. In the entire USA, approximately 21,810 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Nia. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Nia is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Nia cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #290 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2000. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Nia, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their daughter. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Nia seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Nia was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
496 babies were named Nia in 2022 - that's 1 in 298,855 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Nia ranked 545 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter N is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for girls' names: 4.1% of all common girls' names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters of girls' names are A and S, while X and U are the least common initials of girls' names.
With only three letters, the name Nia is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
Thus, it follows that with 4.1% of all girls' names starting with an N, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. Nevertheless, there are girls' names with N that are quite common, the most common in the U.S. at present is Nancy.
If your name is Nia and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Nia, you can simply say:
Nut
Igloo
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Nia
Nia
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
N
I
A
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
N
I
A
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Nia sounds like this:
