Jabulani
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Be happy (The book of African names)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 11 countries · latest register: Eswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots, 2023
/ʄaɓulani/(machine-generated) Swahili · model-generated
Jabulani is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country, where it is the 77th most common given name.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 920(inferred from the name graph)
- GYGuyana1 in 750K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 990Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 95 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 923 (inferred from the name graph)
≈69,000 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Jabulani
- Swahili:/ʄaɓulani/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Be happy
Cited for this meaning 1
- The book of African names
Where in the world
(measured from records)Jabulani counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | #77 | ≈69,000 est. | ≈1 in 923 | — | Jabulani | 68 |
| ZW Zimbabwe | #855 | ≈3,000 est. | ≈1 in 5.5K | — | Jabulani | 28 |
| ZM Zambia | — | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 11K | 1 | Jabulani | 10 |
| MW Malawi | — | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Jabulani | 6 |
| SZ Eswatini | #48 | ≈250 est. | ≈1 in 5.1K | 29 | Jabulani | 6 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 7 | 1 in 2.5M | 7 | Jabulani | 4 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: ECZ 2021 Councillor Elections — candidate results; Eswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Jabulani is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Be happy! Rejoice!
as a nameThe African book of names
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Jabulani Adatus Nxumalob. 1944ZASouth African Catholic prelate (born 1944
- Jabulani Dubazanab. 1954ZASouth African musician
- Jabs Newbyb. 1991CAnot in their usual nameCanadian professional basketball player
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence
(measured from records)18 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 11 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Jabulani mean, and where does it come from?
- Be happy Recorded by The book of African names.
- How do you pronounce Jabulani?
- In Swahili /ʄaɓulani/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Is Jabulani a male or female name?
- Jabulani is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- Which countries have the most people named Jabulani?
- Mondonomo estimates about 69 thousand people named Jabulani in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled jabulani. After it come Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Eswatini; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Jabulani?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 7 people named Jabulani, about 1 in 2.5 million residents.
- How common is Jabulani compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Jabulani is the 77th most common given name of 189,620 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Jabulani?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/jabulaniThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Jabulani” — the 77th most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.