  We report investigations on the statistical characteristics of the baby names
given between 1910 and 2010 in the United States of America. For each year, the
100 most frequent names in the USA are sorted out. For these names, the
correlations between the names profiles are calculated for all pairs of states
(minus Hawaii and Alaska). The correlations are used to form a weighted network
which is found to vary mildly in time. In fact, the structure of communities in
the network remains quite stable till about 1980. The goal is that the
calculated structure approximately reproduces the usually accepted geopolitical
regions: the North East, the South, and the "Midwest + West" as the third one.
Furthermore, the dataset reveals that the name distribution satisfies the Zipf
law, separately for each state and each year, i.e. the name frequency $f\propto
r^{-\alpha}$, where r is the name rank. Between 1920 and 1980, the exponent
alpha is the largest one for the set of states classified as 'the South', but
the smallest one for the set of states classified as "Midwest + West". Our
interpretation is that the pool of selected names was quite narrow in the
Southern states. The data is compared with some related statistics of names in
Belgium, a country also with different regions, but having quite a different
scale than the USA. There, the Zipf exponent is low for young people and for
the Brussels citizens.

Physics and Society;Social and Information Networks