Ways of renaming of modern Ukrainian villages. Restoring the former names

The active nominating processes have started in the linguistic landscape of Ukrainequite recently. These processes have been caused by the political and economic transformationof the society: most importantly by the need to rename a number of cities,villages and streets in accordance with the law of decommunization, which came intoforce in 2015. This research is focused on 889 names of Ukrainian villages and urbansettlements that emerged as a result of the decommunization process in 2016. Theanalysis of these oikonyms revealed two main directions of motivational processes.The first of them was restoring the former (old) names to villages (these names, 280oikonyms, 31.5%, make up a third of the whole research material), for instance: villageЖабки / Zhabky, village Кам’янецькі Хутори / Kamjanetski Khutory. The secondway how to rename a settlement was to create new names (there are 609 items of thiskind in the represented material, i.e. 68.5% of all renamings), for instance: villageБережани / Berezhany, village Чумацький Шлях / Chumatskyi Shliakh. When restoringthe historical names, inhabitants, as a rule, used the names from the end of the19th and the beginning of the 20th century or names that emerged at the moment offoundation of the settlement (village Бузькі Пороги / Buzki Porohy, village ВасилівХутір / Vasyliv Khutir). Among 280 restored historical names about 70 belong to thecultural heritage of original nation and national communities of Ukraine, which is about8% of all renamings (village Карабулат / Karabulat, village Торосове / Torosove).