ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ | PROBLEMS OF ONOMASTICS

Anastasia Vladimirovna Kharitonova
Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia

NAME CREATION IN TOPONYMY: ABOUT RENAMING EKATERINBURG

For citation
Kharitonova, A. V. (2025). Name Creation in Toponymy: About Renaming Ekaterinburg. Voprosy onomastiki, 22(2), 183–198. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2025.22.2.021

Received on 11 January 2025
Accepted on 15 February 2025

Abstract: The article examines the problem of renaming the city of Ekaterinburg, the issue of which was raised three times (in 1914, 1924 and 1991). The goal is to identify the underlying patterns of place naming applied to urban toponymy by reconstructing the naming practices of city residents, with particular attention to pragmatic factors — namely, the emotional and sociolinguistic context of renaming. The author consecutively considers the occasional toponyms generated during each renaming episode. For each period, the influence of the extralinguistic situation on the selection of names is discussed. During the First World War (1914), the key linguistic challenge was to replace the Germanic component -burg in the compound Ekaterinburg. In 1924, following the revolution, the public was faced with a different task: to generate a name that would serve as an ideological marker. The adoption of the name Sverdlovsk created an ideological opposition Ekaterinburg vs Sverdlovsk — which in turn became the driving factor for the restoration of the former name in 1991. The author also conducted an experiment involving 200 students from Ural Federal University, who were invited to propose city names suitable for the years 1914 and 1924. The results of this experiment confirmed the productivity of the identified word-formation patterns. The study reveals the following set of productive naming patterns: 1) compound formations consisting of two roots in a subordinate relationship, typically with the second component denoting ‘city’ in one of its morphological variants (e.g. -burg, -grad, -pol, -slavl, -slav, -polis); 2) complex derivative forms incorporating both compound roots and the toponymic suffix -sk-; 3) simple derivative forms based on a single root and the suffix -sk-. Less productive naming types include transonymization, substantivation, and descriptive toponyms based on the model “city on the river”.

Keywords: toponyms; astionyms; renaming; Ekaterinburg; occasional nomination; word-formation pattern; extralinguistic situation

Acknowledgements

The study was funded by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 25-28-01412 The Ural Identity of Ekaterinburg in the ‘bright field’ of the consciousness of the city dweller..

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