Accents and spellings of names

Why IBGE has no accents

IBGE's Technical Note on the 2022 Census names says that diacritical marks were not provided for: acute accent, circumflex accent, grave accent, cedilla, diaeresis and tilde. For that reason, names such as Antônio, Cauã, Luís and Luísa were treated as written without these marks. In practice, a single row of the data can combine two written forms: KAUA counts people named Kauã and people named Kaua; LUIS counts Luís and Luis; THAIS counts Thaís and Thais. There is no way to separate these forms in the census figures.

Different spellings, different counts

With letters, IBGE did the opposite: it kept each spelling as it was written down at collection. The Technical Note gives Ana or Anna, Ian or Yan, and Luis or Luiz as examples, which “were considered separately, with the original spelling from collection”. So Thaís with TH and Taís without the H are two different rows, as are Rafaela and Rafaella. The table below shows some pairs, with the total number of people recorded in the 2022 Census for each spelling (without accents, as IBGE publishes them).

Spelling pairs in the 2022 Census

What the 1943 orthography said

The Orthographic Formulary approved by the Brazilian Academy of Letters on August 12, 1943 treated the letters K, W and Y as being for special use: k was replaced by qu or c, w by u or v and y by i, and h was not written after t. On personal names, item 39 said that proper names “of persons, places and of any kind”, if Portuguese or Portuguese-ized, follow the same rules as common nouns. But item 40 made an exception: “to safeguard individual rights, anyone who wishes may keep in their signature the customary form”.

What the 1990 Orthographic Agreement says

The 1990 Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language was enacted in Brazil by Decree No. 6,583 of September 29, 2008. Base I puts K, W and Y back in the alphabet, which now has 26 letters, and says they are used in personal names originating from other languages and in their derivatives, with examples such as Franklin, Kant, Darwin, Wagner and Byron. The same Base covers names from the biblical tradition: the final digraphs ch, ph and th of Hebrew origin may be kept or simplified; when they are silent, they are dropped, as in José and Nazaré instead of Joseph and Nazareth; and Judite replaces Judith. Forms such as Jacob, Job and David may keep the final consonant, and nothing prevents the use of Jacó, Jó and Davi. Base XXI, on signatures and business names, keeps the exception from 1943: “to safeguard rights, each person may keep the spelling that, by custom or legal registration, they adopt in the signature of their name”.

Most common kinds of variation

• K or C

  Kauã and Cauã are the same name, of Tupi origin; Wiktionary lists Kauã as a variant of Cauã. See Kauã and Cauã.

• Y or I

  Yan and Ian, Yara and Iara: the letter Y, which the 1943 orthography replaced with I, returned to the alphabet in 1990.

• TH or T

  Thaís and Taís, Thiago and Tiago: IBGE counts the form with TH as a different spelling.

• Doubled letters

  Rafaella and Rafaela, Anna and Ana: the doubled letter also produces its own row in the data.

• Z or S

  Luiz and Luís differ in the last letter; IBGE still combines Luís and Luis, because it does not record accents.

How this site groups spellings

Spellings that may be the same name are grouped by mechanical rules: K and C, Y and I, TH and T, doubled letters, silent H and Z or S at the end. Each group is checked when the page is written and again when it is reviewed, and a spelling that is not the same name is taken out of the group. Within the group, each spelling appears with its own 2022 Census number, copied from the IBGE data without estimates. The accent that appears in the page title, as in Kauã or Antônio, is the standard written form in Brazil, and it is used only when a source shows that form. When there is no source, the page uses the plain spelling, without the accent. The methodology describes the full process.

Frequently asked questions