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The name Ukraine (Ukrainian: Україна, Ukrayina, /ukraˈjina/) has been used in a variety of ways since the twelfth century. Today it is the official name of Ukraine, a country in Eastern Europe.

Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration.

History

The word ukraina is first recorded in the fifteenth-century Hypatian Codex of the twelfth and thirteenth-century Primary Chronicle, whose 1187 entry on the death of Prince Volodymyr of Pereyaslav says “The Ukraina groaned for him”, ѡ нем же Оукраина много постона (o nem že Ukraina mnogo postona).^[1] The term is also mentioned for the years 1189, 1213, 1280, and 1282 for various East Slavic lands (for example, Galician Ukrayina, etc),^[2] possibly referring to different principalities of Kievan Rus' (cf. Skljarenko 1991, Pivtorak 1998) or to different borderlands (Vasmer 1953-1958, Rudnyc’kyj and Sychynskyj 1949).

In the sixteenth century, both Polish and Ruthenian sources used the word ukraina (see: Kresy) with specific reference to the large south-eastern Kiev Voivodeship, including the voivodships of Bratslav after 1569 and Chernihiv after 1619.

At the same time, Ruthenian sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to use the word ukraina to refer to any territory, even outside the Slavic regions: e.g. the Barkalabava (Borkolabovo) Chronicle tells about the Sejm at Warsaw in 1587 that there were twenty ambassadors from "different ukrainas", including Turkey, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and Sweden (cf. [1]); and the Peresopnytsia Gospels uses the collocation "Jewish ukrainas" for Judea in John 7:1 and elsewhere).

To the eastward, the word was also taken to refer to the south-western borderlands of Muscovy, for example in the texts by Andrey Kurbsky and Grigory Kotoshikhin. Occasionally, the word had been used to apply to other borderlands of Muscovy as well: Ukraina za Okoju referred to the Upper Principalities, uralskie ukrainy referred to the lands stretching beyond the Ural. In two fifteenth-century Pskovian chronicles and the Tale of the Battle of Kulikovo, ukraina stood for the territory currently known as the Abrene district. Ukraina Terskaja still refers in local parlance to the southern shore of the Kola Peninsula (cf. Vasmer 1953-58).

Seventeenth-century Zaporozhian Cossacks used the term in a more poetic sense, to refer to their 'fatherland'. Western cartographers, including Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan and Johann Baptiste Homman, drew maps of "Ukraine" as the "land of the Cossacks". But the name seems to have been in common use when the Swedish army entered Ukraine in October 1708. The Swedish officers wrote in their diaries that the Desna river was the border between Severia and Ukranien, and further "the city of Baturin, that was the capital of Okranien and Field Marshal Matzeppa's residence" and when Mazepa entered the Swedish headquarters he brought some "distinguished Ukrainian cossacks".^[3]

After the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the word fell into disuse. The Cossack state became the autonomous Hetmanate owing fealty to Muscovy, and eventually became the Russian imperial guberniya of Little Russia (Malorossija). The name Ukraine stuck to the Cossack territories near Kharkiv, alternatively known as the Sloboda Ukraine (literally, ‘borderland of the slobodas’).

During the nineteenth century a cultural and political debate arose among Ukrainians and others about their national status, in both Imperial Russia and Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The 'Russophiles', who saw Moscow and St. Petersburg as the centres of East Slavic culture considered themselves ethnic Little Russians (Malorossy), part of the "Russian" (i.e. East Slavic) people. The 'Old Ruthenians' in Galicia saw themselves as inheritors of the heritage of Kievan Rus’ through the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom. They stuck to the traditional self-appellation Ruthenians (Rusyny, as opposed to Russkije 'Russians', both words being cognates of Rus’).

However, others saw themselves as an independent nation of East Slavs, south of Russia and stretching between Poland and the Caucasus. In the 1830s, Nikolay Kostomarov and his Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kiev started to use the name Ukrainians (Ukrajinci). Their work was suppressed by Russian authorities, and associates including Taras Shevchenko were sent into internal exile, but the idea gained acceptance. It was also taken up by Volodymyr Antonovych and the Khlopomany ('peasant-lovers'), former Polish gentry in Eastern Ukraine, and later by the 'Ukrainophiles' in Galicia, including Ivan Franko. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ukrajina superseded Malorossija in popularity and came to be applied to the whole of modern-day Ukraine, minus the Crimea.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the word ukraina finally became a country name by being applied to a specific geographic territory. The Ukrainian People's Republic (later incorporating the West Ukrainian People's Republic), the Ukrainian State under the Hetmanate, and the Bolshevik Party which created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by 1920 (helping found the Soviet Union in 1922), each named their state Ukraine. In 1991, Ukraine became an independent state.

Ukraina^[4] under King Władysław Jagiełło of Poland

Etymology

During the period of Romantic nationalism it was popular to trace the origin of the country name to an ancient ethnonym. After this pseudo-historical view was discarded, two main versions of the etymology emerged. Naturally, the versions have different implications from a nationalist point of view. They are also based on different possible or certain meanings of the lexeme ukraina as occurring in historical sources (see above) – "borderland" or simply "land", "principality".

Theory A: Modern country name derived from ‘borderland’

The traditional theory (which has been widely supported by historians and linguists in the 19-20th centuries, see e.g. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian) is that the modern name of the country is derived from the term "ukraina" in the sense ‘borderland, frontier region, marches’ etc. These meanings can be derived from the Proto-Slavic root *kraj-, meaning ‘edge, border’. Contemporary parallels for this are Russian okraina ‘outskirts’ and kraj ‘border district’.

This would be a semantic parallel to -mark in Denmark, which originally also denoted a border region (in this case of the Holy Roman Empire, cf. Marches).

In the sixteenth century, the only specific ukraina mentioned very often in Polish and Ruthenian texts was the south-eastern borderland around Kiev, and thus ukraina came to be synonymous with ‘the voivodship of Kiev’ and later ‘the region around Kiev’. In the nineteenth century, when Ukrainian romanticism and nationalism came into existence this name was adopted as the name of the country.

Theory B: Modern country name derived from ‘region, country’

Some modern Ukrainian scholars such as H.P. Pivtorak believe that the name is derived from ukraina in the sense of ‘region, principality, country’ (an alternative etymology would be to derive this meaning from the previously mentioned one by generalization). As seen above in the “History” section, many medieval occurrences of the word can be interpreted as having that meaning. In this sense, the word can be associated with contemporary Ukrainian krajina, Belarusian kraina and Russian and Polish kraj, all meaning ‘country’.

Pivtorak starts from the meaning of kraj as ‘land parcel, territory’ as attested in many Slavic languages and states that it acquired from early on the meaning ‘a tribe's territory’; *ukraj and *ukrajina would then mean "a separated land parcel, a separate part of a tribe's territory". Later, as the Kievan Rus disintegrated in the 12th century, its ukrainas would become independent principalities, hence the new (and earliest actually attested) meaning of ukraina as ‘principality’. Still later, lands that became part of Lithuania (Chernigov and Seversk Principalities, Kiev Principality, Pereyaslav Principality and the most part of the Volyn Principality) were sometimes called Lithuanian ukraina, while lands that became part of Poland (Halych Principality and part of the Volyn Principality) were called Polish Ukrayina.

In addition, some^[who?] have derived the same meaning ‘region, principality, country’ from another meaning of the word *kraj-, namely ‘to cut’—as in Church Slavonic кроити (kroiti), краꙗти (krajati)—that is, ‘the land someone carved out for themselves’.^{[citation needed]}

Syntax

Ukraine versus the Ukraine

In English, the country was formerly usually referred to with the definite article, that is, the Ukraine (as in the Netherlands, the Gambia, the Bronx, the Congo, and sometimes the Sudan), and sometimes still is. However, usage without the article is now more frequent,^[5] and has become established in journalism and diplomacy since the country's independence (for example, within the style guides of The Economist [2], The Guardian [3] and The Times [4]). The use of the definite article is standard in German (die Ukraine), although this is generally required for all non-neuter place names.

Conventional name

Ukraine is both the conventional short and long name of the country. This name is stated in the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Before independence in 1991, Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Preposition usage in Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic languages

In the Ukrainian language, there was a change in the way of saying "in Ukraine" following the country's independence. Traditional usage is na Ukrajini (with the preposition na, "on"), but recently Ukrainian authorities have begun using v Ukrajini (with the preposition v, "in", which is also used with most other country names). Meanwhile usage in Russian varies. Russian-language media in Ukraine are increasingly using the parallel form v Ukraine. However, the media in Russia continue to use the standard na Ukraine. Note that the preposition na is also used for some regions of Russia as well as with Rus, the historical homeland of Eastern Slavs (na Rusi).

The preposition na continues to be used with Ukraine (and with Rus') in other Slavic languages, including Polish, Czech and Slovak. This is a usage typically found with lands that have not always been considered distinct political entities (for example, Polish also uses na with its names for Hungary and Lithuania).

Phonetics and orthography

This section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (November 2008)

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)

Among the western European languages, there is inter-language variation (and even sometimes intra-language variation) in the phonetic vowel quality of Ukraine's /ai/ combination, and its written expression. It is variously:

• Treated as a diphthong, rendered in some languages as /ai/ (for example, German Ukraine /u'krainə/) and others as /ei/ (for example, English Ukraine /ju'krein/)
• Treated as a pure vowel (for example, French Ukraine /ykrɛn/)
• Transformed in other ways (for example, Spanish Ucrania /u'kranja/)
• Treated as two juxtaposed vowel sounds, with some phonetic degree of approximant [j] in between that may or may not be recognized phonemically. This version of pronunciation is sometimes represented orthographically with a dieresis, or tréma (for example, Dutch Oekraïne, or also Ukraïne, an often-seen Latin-alphabet transliteration of Україна that is an alternative to Ukrayina). This version most closely resembles the vowel quality of the Ukrainian version of the word. This treatment is sometimes heard or seen in German and French, although it may not be regarded as standard in those languages.

See also

Look up Ukraine in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Etymology of Rus’ and derivatives
• List of etymologies of country subdivision names: "Ukraine"
• Kiev: "Kiev or Kyiv?"
• Toponymy

Notes

References

• Balušok, Vasyl’ (2005). "Jak rusyny staly ukrajincjamy (How Rusyns became Ukrainians)" (in Ukrainian). Dzerkalo tyžnja 27. http://www.zn.kiev.ua/. 
• Borschak, E. (1984). "Rus, Mala Rossia, Ukraina". Revue des Etudes Slaves 24. 
• Gregorovich, Andrew (1994). "Ukraine or 'the Ukraine'?". Forum Ukrainian Review 90 (Spring/Summer). http://www.infoukes.com/faq/the_ukraine/. 
• Magocsi, Paul Robert (1996). "The name ‘Ukraine’". A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 171–72. ISBN 0-8020-7820-6. 
• Ohijenko, Ivan (2001) [1949]. "Naši nazvy: Rus’ – Ukrajina – Malorosija (Our names: Rus’ – Ukraine – Little Russia)" (in Ukrainian). Istorija ukrajins’koji literaturnoji movy (History of the Ukrainian standard language). Kiev: Naša kul’tura i nauka. pp. 98–105. ISBN 966-7821-01-3. http://litopys.org.ua/ohukr/ohu04.htm. 
• Pivtorak, Hryhorij Petrovyč (1998) (in Ukrainian). Pochodžennja ukrajinciv, rosijan, bilorusiv ta jichnich mov (The origin of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and their languages). Kiev: Akademia. ISBN 966-580-082-5. http://litopys.org.ua/pivtorak/pivt12.htm. .
• Rudnyc’kyj, Jaroslav; Volodymyr Sichynskyi (1949). "Nazva Ukrajina (The name Ukraine)". Encyklopedija ukrajinoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukrainian studies). 1. Munich/New York. pp. 12–16. 
• Šerech [= Shevelov], Yury (1952). "An important work in Ukrainian onomastics". Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 2 (4). 
• Skljarenko, Vitalij (1991). "Zvidky pochodyt’ nazva Ukrajina? (What is the origin of the name Ukraine?)" (in Ukrainian). Ukrajina 1. 
• Vasmer, Max (1953-58) (in German). Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 1-3. Heidelberg: Winter.  Russian translation: Fasmer, Maks (1964-73). Ėtimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. 1-4. transl. Oleg N. Trubačev. Moscow: Progress. http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Fshare%2Fstarling%2Fmorpho&basename=%5Cusr%5Clocal%5Cshare%5Cstarling%5Cmorpho%5Cvasmer%5Cvasmer&text_word=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0&method_word=beginning. 

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