Yanis
A French form of a Greek name meaning "god is gracious". Only just over a hundred men in Poland carry it, so most Poles have never met one.
Yanis Pronunciation
Yanis is pronounced ih-AH-nyees (/ɨˈaɲis/).
What Yanis means
Where Yanis comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Yanis reaches back to the Greek Ioannes, the name that gave Europe its many forms of John. Greek borrowed Ioannes from the Hebrew Yohanan long before it reached France. The meaning behind it is old and direct: god is gracious. Greek shortened Ioannes into Yannis, and French readers spelled that sound as Yanis.
The French took to it slowly. Yanis appeared on French birth records in the 1980s, following the popularity of Yannick, and spread widely only after 2000. In 2007 it reached its peak, with 4,166 boys given the name that year.
Yanis carries no diminutive and no feminine twin, five letters standing on their own. On a Polish class register today, it sits among names with a longer local history. Its Polish gloss stays the same as the Greek promise: bóg jest łaskawy.
How many people are named Yanis
1 in 209276 men in Poland is named Yanis. 102 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3419 among male names.
Yanis's popularity over time
Fewer than 2 boys were given the name in 2025. It has been climbing since 2025.
Yanis as a middle name
Yanis is a first name for 102 men in Poland and a middle name for another 18, an 85/15 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 2182nd, between Willibald (18) and Abdelaziz (17).