Now that I have done an overview of the name Aria and its variants, I will discuss connotations as well as a more detailed description of Aria’s journey. In this part I will include research on Arya in addition to the research I did on Aria. I wanted to focus on this variant(rather than the other variants) for two reasons: Arya is similar to Aria( in pronunciation and having an -a ending) and Arya has similar cultural forces that made its trend similar to Aria. So, why might someone name their child Arya instead of Aria?

Using the data frame where names and which state they belong to - that was so kindly provided in class-, I found that Aria is a relatively recent name. It did not pop up until 1973. The name remains exclusive to California for many years. Over the years it, generally, rose in popularity among numerous states across the United States, but still California holds the most amount of Arias.

To investigate the gender connotations associated with Aria, I looked at how popular the name was using the same data frame as before and I ran a correlation graph. The Aria is consistently female in many states. Female Arias have been around longer than male Arias (and the variant). Aria, as a male name, only appears in the database for the state of California from its first appearance in 1988 to its most recent appearance in 2019. Gender connotations can also vary depending on ethnic background.

For the ethnic connotations of Aria, I looked to wikipedia for notable persons who share the name (as a first name) and used the crowdsourcing information from Behind the Name as a support (as well as a visual representation of data). Ethnically Western Arias (American, British, Canadian, Australian) tend to be female. This shows for fictional characters as well (Aria from Pretty Little Liars). In West Asian culture (Persian/Arabic/India), Aria is associated with masculinity. This is interesting because it disproves my previous observation about how “a” ending names are feminine names.

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Arya is very similar to Aria and not just in spelling and pronunciation. Arya, as stated previously, trends similarly because of the GOT effect. Also, Arya first shows up in California as well. However, there are some slight differences that I would consider important . Arya, as a male name, appears on the statewide database earlier than Aria by 5 years. While that may not seem very important, I will elaborate on how I think this is worth noting later. The most noticeable difference I see is the lag in female Aryas. Female Aryas do not appear until the year 2002. And they stay in trend throughout the rest of the years present in the dataframe. However, female Aryas soon pass their male counterparts and become more similar to Aria. In modern usage Aria and Arya are overwhelmingly feminine asscociated.

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Bibliography Social Security Administration. “Baby Names Index.” Accessed November 10, 2021.