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Salai

Salai. Attested in France, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 244 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, spelt two ways

One systematic substitution — s for z, w for v, ch for h — where BOTH spellings are independently attested surnames. Kosina and Kozina are one man in two clerks' handwriting. Stronger than sounding alike, weaker than somebody having checked.

SzalaiSalaySallaiSalaj

Only sounds alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence.

SalàŠaliSalauSalgiSaliiSalli

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being SalaySalay — 6,428
Where those places are. A dot is a settlement whose name is this surname, sized by its population — not a claim that anybody of the name lives there. Phonetic neighbours are listed below but not drawn: putting a machine's guess on the ground would dress it up as geography.

This is as close to an origin as this map will go. A surname that is also a place name often came from it — and often did not: plenty are occupations or patronymics that happen to collide with a place, and plenty of places are named after a family rather than the other way round. It is a fact with a source, which is more than an etymology page offers.

  • Salay Philippines pop. 6,428 a spelling of the name
  • Sali Senegal pop. 41,811 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Šaľa Slovakia pop. 20,239 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Sala Sweden pop. 13,087 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Sala Italy pop. 6,237 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Sali Croatia pop. 726 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: France, Spain, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 9 peopleSpain — 35 peopleFrance — 200 people
A dot is a country, not a place. It sits at the country's centre because a national register counts a country; nothing here says where in it these people are. A hollow ring is attested but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each, and a family archive finds a name without counting heads. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 4 countries where the eleven registers and eight archives behind this atlas attest the name. Most of the world has no surname register this project can read, and the ones that do and will not are listed with the reason.
Belgium, by commune. 9 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 9. This is the only country here that can be drawn this way — every other register counts a country and stops, so a blank elsewhere is a gap in what states publish, not in the name.
1 place drawn, the largest being AntwerpenAntwerpen — 9

Country by country

Each country below can carry up to three different kinds of evidence, and none of them is the same claim. A register is a head-count — a state counted these people. A record is one document naming the surname on that ground, narrower evidence and often much older. And a volume overlapping these dates is a document from the right place and years — never a document known to name this surname. None of the three ever means the name exists in that country and nowhere else, or that it exists nowhere but here.

France

200 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

88 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1450s, 1890s, 1920s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Salai is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Salai. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

35 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

29,422 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1590s, 1600s, 1620s, 1800s, 1810s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Salai is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Salai. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

9 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

12 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1970s — the decades Salai is attested here. None is known to name Salai: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Salai in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

When it was being born, in France

INSEE counts births by surname and decade from the état civil, 1891 to 2000 — the only dated evidence in this dataset. A name that starts at zero and climbs arrived; a name that falls to nothing left, died out, or emigrated, and the decade it stops is the decade to stop searching. It counts births registered in France, so a family that emigrated in 1900 simply stops appearing, which is information rather than a defect.

  • 1891–1900 2
  • 1901–1910 12
  • 1911–1920 15
  • 1921–1930 18
  • 1931–1940 14
  • 1941–1950 16
  • 1951–1960 25
  • 1961–1970 27
  • 1971–1980 19
  • 1981–1990 29
  • 1991–2000 23

Whose archive held that ground, and when

Every surname site can tell you a name is common somewhere. This one also knows which filing system held that ground in which years — and those are the two halves of one question: my people were called this, they were there, so who has the paper, and for which century. A name in Croatia before 1881 may sit in a military series and not a county one; a name in the Netherlands before 1811 has no civil record at all, only a baptism.

This is about the ground, not about your family. A register counting a name in a country says nothing about which village. And these are the pieces of a country this atlas has drawn, which in a large one may be a corner of it — Acadia reaches into Maine and is not a statement about the United States, and Bohemia's ground crosses into Poland. Each region's own page says which ground it covers. Where a country is missing below, nothing covers it yet.

France
Belgium
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

No record region is drawn yet for Spain — which is a gap in this atlas and not a statement about that country.

Find Salai on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable