OEKONYMY OF UKRAINE IN THE 20TH-21ST CENTURIES: DEFORMATION AND RENEWAL (LINGUISTIC-HISTORICAL AND ECOLINGUISTIC DIMENSIONS)

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the changes that took place in the Ukrainian oekonymy during the 20th–21st centuries. It outlines the directions of its deformation in the Soviet period, analyzes the proportionality of the Soviet oekonymycide and the post-Soviet restoration of the oykonymic landscape and emphasizes the main problems on the way to overcoming the colonial legacy in the names of settlements of Ukraine. The changes in the oekonymy of Ukraine during the Soviet times became a mirror reflection of the ideology of that time: the main ideologemes of the regime were fixed in the oekonyms by deforming its motivational base and turning them from a means of individualization into propaganda stamps; the cult of personality that was decisive for the dominant doctrine was manifested in the significant productivity of memorial oekonyms; the government’s focus on the ethnic assimilation resulted in phonetic and grammatical russification of names and destruction of their deep connection with the local community. At the time of independence, some consequences of these processes were eliminated, some of the historical names were restored, and the originaly Soviet names were changed. However, overcoming the consequences, decommunization did not affect the root causes which are the Soviet principles of nomination, so this aspect still needs careful attention. Also, the issue of linguistic examination of the oekonymy of different regions of Ukraine remains urgent as well as acquisition of real validity by the norm of Art. 41 of the Law of Ukraine ‘On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language’, which establishes that toponyms must be performed in the state language, and therefore determines the need to eliminate the still numerous oeconyms, wich still keep signs of lingual assimilation.