Mediterranean Name Generator

There is no single Mediterranean naming tradition; the sea is ringed by more than twenty countries and three major language families, so a Mediterranean name generator has to behave like a map. Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, Corsican and Maltese names sit on the Romance side: saints' names with -o and -a endings, surnames such as Rinaldi, Navarro, Puig and Borg, and Maltese names like Camilleri and Farrugia that are Sicilian-Arabic hybrids. Greek and Cypriot names are built from Orthodox baptismal names and patronymic surnames in -opoulos, -idis, -akis or -ou; Turkish names use Ottoman-era given names with surnames chosen after 1934 like Yılmaz and Demir.

The southern and eastern shores are mostly Arabic. Lebanese names mix Christian choices (Georges Gemayel, Joelle Maalouf) with Muslim ones (Ali Jaber), Egyptian names chain a given name to the father's (Ahmed Hassan, Mariam Ibrahim), and Maghrebi names carry Ben-, Bou- and El- prefixes. Croatian, Slovenian and Montenegrin names on the Adriatic use Slavic -ić surnames, while Albanian, Israeli and Libyan names round out the coast.

Every entry is a plausible first-and-last pairing from one of these cultures, not a blend of several, so the names hold up for novels, screenplays, RPG campaigns and games set anywhere from Barcelona to Beirut.