Malia is the Hawaiian form of Maria, and so a sister to Mary — a name of deep tradition given an island softness. In Hawaiian its gentle vowels feel sunlit and calm, and it is sometimes also linked to a Swahili word for calm or queen.
Malia does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Malia reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.