Call Me João: Portugal's Strange Obsession With Naming Everyone the Same Thing

Walk into any Portuguese café and shout “João Silva.” Half a dozen men will reach for their phones. Try “Maria Santos,” and women across three generations will look up. In Portugal, individuality begins with a paradox — your name, the first word that should make you unique, is often the one thing that doesn’t.

According to the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, the most common surnames in Portugal — Silva, Santos, Ferreira, Pereira — have barely changed in a century. Cross the Atlantic and the pattern intensifies: Brazil’s census shows Silva alone represents 34 million people, roughly 16% of the population — a concentration far exceeding Smith in the United States (less than 1%) or García in Spain (around 3%). The Lusophone world is a hall of mirrors reflecting Silvas, Santos, Marias, and Josés, a repetitive chant stretching from Lisbon to Luanda.

But this isn’t random tradition or lazy naming. It’s a legacy of authoritarianism, colonial violence, and the Church’s grip on what it means to exist legally.

The dictatorship of names

Under Salazar’s Estado Novo (1933–1974), naming your child was an act of obedience. The regime’s Código do Registo Civil required that all Portuguese names be chosen from an “approved list” — saintly, patriotic, or linguistically pure. Civil registrars, often guided by local priests, could deny anything that sounded foreign, modern, or suspiciously un-Christian.

A name was never just a name; it was an instrument of national hygiene. Salazar’s Portugal built its social order around Catholic morality — banning jazz, censoring cinema, and, yes, policing birth certificates. You could name your son António, but not Elvis. Maria de Fátima was acceptable; Liberdade (Freedom) would raise eyebrows and be rejected.

Not that many tried. The regime’s cultural suffocation was so complete that self-censorship became instinct. Naming turned into an ideological filter that reduced life to repetition — a procession of Joãos and Marias marching through the registry in alphabetical formation. Even after 1974’s Carnation Revolution, the habit persisted. The law softened but didn’t break: the current Portuguese Civil Code (Article 103) still allows registrars to refuse names deemed “ridiculous” or likely to expose a child to mockery, maintaining one of Europe’s most conservative naming systems. In practice, foreign names remain discouraged, though enforcement now depends on the registrar’s discretion.

Colonial inheritance and erased identities

This authoritarian logic didn’t stop at Portugal’s borders — it was exported through empire. While Salazar was policing Lisbon birth certificates, the same bureaucratic machinery was operating across Africa and Brazil, standardizing souls like administrative units. The repetition isn’t just domestic; it’s colonial.

In Brazil, Silva and Santos aren’t merely popular — they’re monuments to erasure. Enslaved Africans, stripped of their original identities, were baptized with Portuguese surnames. Silva (from silva, Latin for forest) was often assigned by priests as a blank placeholder for those whose histories had been stolen. Dos Santos (“of the saints”) marked mass baptisms performed on All Saints’ Day, when the Church processed human beings like paperwork.

These names — born from dispossession — became the invisible architecture of modern Brazilian identity. In a country still structured by hierarchy and skin tone, Silva is both everywhere and nowhere: a name that reveals nothing and everything about where you come from, who owned your ancestors, and how power still moves through the archives.

Across the Lusophone map, naming served empire. In Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and São Tomé, the Church baptized Indigenous children into “civilization” through Portuguese Christian names. To speak Portuguese and carry a saint’s name was to exist under empire’s shadow — to become legible to colonial power.

Brazil’s revenge: the phonetic rebellion

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Brazil has taken Portugal’s naming rigidity and blown it up into chaos. Where Salazar enforced sameness, modern Brazil embraces creative anarchy — but with a twist that exposes its own contradictions.

Brazilian law allows any word that has been printed to serve as a first name, and parents can change their children’s names within the first year without needing a reason. The result is a naming landscape that would horrify Lisbon’s civil registrars: imagination replaces orthodoxy, irony replaces sanctity, and wordplay becomes identity.

Some names read like surrealist poetry: Barrigudinha Seleida (“Pot-bellied Seleida”), José Amâncio e Seus Trinta e Nove (“José Amâncio and His Thirty Nines”), Magnésia Bisurada (“Sodium Bicarbonate”), Naida Navinda Navolta Pereira(“Going, Coming, Back Pereira”), Napoleão Sem Medo e Sem Mácula (“Fearless and Sinless Napoleon”), or Otávio Bundasseca (“Dry Buttock Otávio”). They sound absurd — and yet each was officially registered in a Brazilian cartório.

In the football world, the naming creativity turns epic: Creedence Clearwater Couto (named after the U.S. rock band) and Marx Lenin dos Santos Gonçalves (named after two communist icons) both made professional rosters. It’s as if Brazil’s civil registries became laboratories for linguistic remix — part satire, part self-invention.

This naming freedom is its own form of post-colonial assertion. If Portugal enforced purity through restriction, Brazil asserts sovereignty through explosion. Every eccentric name is a small declaration: we’ll take your language, your religion, your cultural rules — and make them ours, with laughter. What began as colonial erasure mutates here into wordplay, parody, and resistance.

Letters like K, Y, and W were only recently added to the Brazilian alphabet, so names containing them are often replaced with phonetic equivalents. The result isn’t cultural imperialism — it’s cultural remixing. Brazil takes English names, bends them through Portuguese phonetics, and creates something that belongs fully to neither language. It’s linguistic code-switching as identity formation.

You’ll find names like Wellington, Jenifer, Edison, and Sharon sitting alongside Indigenous names like Cauã, Kauê, Iara, and Raoni. A country once baptized into Portuguese Christian sameness now names its children Ligongo, Keyton, and Esheley. The same culture that produced millions of Silvas now celebrates Preta Gil (literally “Black Gil”) and Moreno Veloso (“Brown Veloso”) — names that would have been unthinkable, possibly illegal, in Salazar’s Portugal.

This naming freedom is its own form of post-colonial assertion. If Portugal enforced purity through restriction, Brazil asserts sovereignty through explosion. Every Wanderley is a small declaration: we’ll take your language, your names, your cultural products, and make them ours on our terms. The phonetic distortion isn’t ignorance — it’s transformation.

From Salazar to the algorithm

Back in Portugal, homogeneity persists — not by decree, but by data. On social media, João Silvas and Maria Santoses blur into one undifferentiated mass. Try finding a specific João Silva on LinkedIn: you’ll get thousands, each claiming to be a different person yet sharing an identical digital fingerprint.

The consequences are more than inconvenient. Portuguese emigrants report job applications lost in automated systems that flag their names as duplicates. Banks struggle to verify identities when three João Silvas share the same birthdate and city. Government databases crash when trying to distinguish between citizens whose names and parents’ names are identical.

And sometimes the confusion scales all the way up. In 2023, Prime Minister António Costa resigned after prosecutors, reviewing police wire-taps, mistook him for another António Costa Silva — his own economy minister. The mix-up briefly toppled the government. It wasn’t corruption that felled a leader, but the country’s naming monoculture eating its own tail.

What began as authoritarian control has mutated into a crisis of visibility. In a globalized world obsessed with uniqueness, Portugal’s old naming rigidity creates a peculiar disadvantage: you can’t be found because your name has been copied too many times. The dictatorship’s ghost now jams the algorithm.

The politics of the name

Names, in Portugal, are mirrors of power — from the Church’s pulpit to the civil registrar’s desk to today’s search bar. They reveal how a country once obsessed with purity still carries the weight of that obsession: the desire to appear orderly, the fear of standing out, and the inertia of centuries of repetition.

The question isn’t whether Portugal will abandon this system — cultural gravity is too strong, and genuine affection for these names has taken root. The question is whether the next generation will understand what their names carry: not just family history, but the story of who was allowed to have a history at all.

Maybe the quiet revolution happens when a parent in Lisbon names their daughter Liberdade — not as a slogan, but as a right long denied. Not to erase João and Maria, but to sit alongside them. To let the echo chamber become a chorus with room for dissonance.

Until then, the repetition continues.
João. Maria. Silva. Santos.
Repeat after the nation.