East Slavic name

East Slavic naming customs are the traditional way of identifying a person's given name, patronymic name, and family name in East Slavic cultures in Russia and some countries formerly part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

They are used commonly in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and to a lesser extent in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

Given names

East Slavic parents select a given name for a newborn child. Most first names in East Slavic languages originate from two sources:

Eastern Orthodox Church tradition

native pre-Christian Slavic lexicons

Almost all first names are single. Doubled first names (as in, for example, French, like Jean-Luc) are very rare and are from foreign influence. Most doubled first names are written with a hyphen: Mariya-Tereza.

Males

Females

Forms

Being highly synthetic languages, the East Slavic ones treat personal names as grammatical nouns and apply the same rules of inflection and derivation to them as for other nouns. So one can create many forms with different degrees of affection and familiarity by adding the corresponding suffixes to the auxiliary stem derived from the original name. The auxiliary stem may be identical to the word stem of the full name (the full name Жанна Zhanna can have the suffixes added directly to the stem Жанн- Zhann- like Жанночка Zhannochka), and most names have the auxiliary stem derived unproductively (the Russian name Михаил, Mikhail has the auxiliary stem Миш-, Mish-, which produces such name-forms as Миша, (Misha), Мишенька, (Mishenka), Мишуня, (Mishunya) etc., not Михаилушка, (Mikhailushka)).

Unlike English, in which the use of diminutive forms is optional even between close friends, in East Slavonic languages, such forms are obligatory in certain contexts because of the strong T–V distinction: the T-form of address usually requires the short form of the counterpart's name.