Having the identifier first makes it easier to parse unambiguously; the C syntax has been historically criticized for not being context-free because of stuff like "A * B" being impossible to parse correctly without knowing whether A is a type or not. While Java doesn't have the equivalent problem, Kotlin keeps its options open wrt future syntactic extensions for type names.

Identifier-first can also be a lot more readable when gnarly (and thus lengthy) types are involved, since you don't have to scan the line to find it. It makes for neater-looking code with multiple declarations one after another, too.

As far as commonality, both syntaxes are very common, and have been so historically as well (roughly speaking, C vs Pascal syntax families). It should also be noted that most new languages go for identifier-first, so if anything, it's more future-proof in this sense.