Name of Ukraine



The earliest known usage of the name Ukraine (Україна, Вкраїна, romanized: Vkraina ; Ѹкраина/Ꙋкраина ) appears in the Hypatian Codex of c. 1425 under the year 1187 in reference to a part of the territory of Kievan Rus'. The use of "the Ukraine" has been officially deprecated by the Ukrainian government and many English-language media publications.

Ukraine is the official full name of the country, as stated in its declaration of independence and its constitution; there is no official alternative long name. From 1922 until 1991, Ukraine was the informal name of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union (annexed by Germany as Reichskommissariat Ukraine during 1941–1944). After the Russian Revolution in 1917–1921, there were the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic and Ukrainian State, recognized in early 1918 as consisting of nine governorates of the former Russian Empire (without Taurida's Crimean Peninsula), plus Chelm and the southern part of Grodno Governorate.

Etymology
Originally, the word ѹкра́ина (вкра́ина), from which the proper noun has been derived, formed in particular from the root -краи- (krai) and the prefix ѹ-/в- that later merged with the root due to metanalysis.

The ambiguity occurs due to the polysemous nature of the root край, as it may mean either a boundary/edge of a certain area or an area defined by certain boundaries,  nevertheless the both meanings allow for the formation of a valid toponym. For instance, the country name Danmark is a composition Danish + boundary.

Kievan Chronicle (Hypatian Codex) sub anno 1187 and 1189
The oldest recorded mention of the word ukraina is found in the Kievan Chronicle under the year 1187, as preserved in the Hypatian Codex written c. 1425 in an Old East Slavic variety of Church Slavonic. The passage narrates the death of Volodimer Glebovich, prince of Pereyaslavl' ((r. 1169 – 1187)):

ѡ нем же Ѹкраина много постона. (ō nem zhe Ukraina mnogo postona). "The frontier (Ukraina) mourned a great deal for him." (Lisa L. Heinrich, 1977) "The ukraïna groaned with grief for him." (Paul R. Magocsi, 2010)

In context, Ukraina referred to the territory of the Principality of Pereyaslavl, which was located between Kievan Rus' heartland in the Middle Dnieper region to the west, and the Pontic–Caspian steppe to the southeast, which the Rus' chronicles customarily referred to as "the land of the Polovtsi". "Ukraine" came to mean "steppe frontier" or "steppe borderland" in the Ukrainian, Polish and Russian languages thereafter.

The next mention of ukraina in the same Kievan Chronicle occurs sub anno 1189, which narrates how a certain Rostislav Berladnichich was invited by some, but not all, "men of Galich" (modern Halych), to take power in the Principality of Galicia: еха и Смоленьска в борзѣ и приѣхавшю же емоу ко Оукраинѣ Галичькои и взя два города Галичькъıи и отолѣ поіде к Галичю. "And he went in haste from Smolensk, and when he had come to the Galičan frontier," (ukraině Galichĭkoi) "he captured two Galičan cities. And from there he went to [the city of] Galič (...)." (Lisa L. Heinrich, 1977)

Serhii Plokhy (2015, 2021) connected the 1189 mention to that of 1187, stating that both referred to the same region: '1187–1189 A Kyivan chronicler first uses the word "Ukraine" to describe the steppe borderland from Pereiaslav in the east to Galicia in the west.'

Late Middle Ages
The Kievan Chronicle and subsequent Galician–Volhynian Chronicle in the Hypatian Codex mention ukraina again under the years 1189, 1213, 1280, and in 1282, where it is applied in various contexts. In these decades, and the following centuries until the end of the Middle Ages, this term was applied to fortified borderlands of different principalities of Rus' without a specific geographic fixation: Halych-Volhynia, the (Western) Buh region, Pskov, Polatsk, Ryazan etc. According to Serhii Plokhy (2006), 'the Muscovites referred to their steppe borderland as "Ukraine," while reserving different names for areas bordering on the settled territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland.'

Early modern cartography


The Radziwiłł map of 1613 (formal title Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae; originally published in 1603) was the first map to indicate the terms "Ukraine" and "Cossacks". In the mid-17th century, Franco-Polish cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, who had spent the 1630s as a military engineer and architect designing and building fortifications in the region, played a significant role in popularising Ukraine as a name and a concept to a broader Western European audience, both through his maps and his writings. His 1648 map in Latin was titled ''Delineatio Generalis Camporum Desertorum vulgo Ukraina. Cum adjacentibus Provinciis ("General illustration of desert plains, in vernacular (speech) Ukraine. With adjacent Provinces."), thereby 'using the term "Ukraine" to denote all the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland that bordered on the uninhabited steppe areas (campus desertorum'')'. Beauplan's French-language publication of the second edition of Description d'Vkranie ("Description of Ukraine", Rouen 1660; the first edition dates from 1651) defined Ukraine as "several provinces of the Kingdom of Poland lying between the borders of Muscovy and the frontiers of Transylvania". This book became wildly popular in Western Europe, and was translated into Latin, Dutch, Spanish and English in the 1660s to 1680s, and reprinted numerous times throughout the rest of the 17th century and the entire 18th century. On another map, published in Amsterdam in 1645, the sparsely inhabited region to the north of the Azov sea is called Okraina and is characterized to the proximity to the Dikoye pole (Wild Fields), posing a constant threat of raids of Turkic nomads (Crimean Tatars and the Nogai Horde).

Early modern Slavonic texts
By the 17th century, Ukraine was sometimes used to define various other, non-steppe borderlands, but the word received more commonly-used and eventually fixed meanings in the second half of the 17th century. After the south-western lands of former Rus' were subordinated to the Polish Crown in 1569, the territory from eastern Podillia to Zaporizhia got the unofficial name Ukraina due to its border function to the nomadic Tatar world in the south. A 1580 royal decree by Stefan Batory 'made mention of Ruthenian, Kyivan, Volhynian, Podolian, and Bratslavian Ukraine'. The Polish chronicler Samuel Grądzki (died 1672), who wrote about the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1660, explained the word Ukraina as the land located at the edge of the Polish kingdom. Thus, in the course of the 16th–18th centuries Ukraine became a concrete regional name among other historic regions such as Podillia, Severia, or Volhynia. It was used for the middle Dnieper River territory controlled by the Cossacks. The people of Ukraina were called Ukrainians (українці, or українники).

Later, the term Ukraine was used for the Cossack Hetmanate lands on both sides of the Dnieper, although it didn't become the official name of the state. Nevertheless, in diplomatic correspondence between the Zaporozhian Host and the tsar of Muscovy, Cossack officials increasingly used the term "Ukraine" to denote the Cossack Hetmanate ever since Bohdan Khmelnytsky's leadership. A May 1660 set of negotiation instructions written by hetman Yurii Khmelnytsky defined "Ukraine" as the territory controlled by the Cossack state according to the Treaty of Zboriv (1649), thus making it a political rather than geographic term. The scope of this Cossack political concept of Ukraine was remarkably different from that popularised by Beauplan (who was influenced by Polish traditions) around the same time; Beauplan's Vkrainie was first and foremost a set of voivodeships controlled by the Kingdom of Poland, characterised by their juxtaposition to the steppes as opposed to the rest of Poland.

Modern period
From the 18th century on, Ukraine became known in the Russian Empire by the geographic term Little Russia. In the 1830s, Mykola Kostomarov and his Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv started to use the name Ukrainians. 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 Halychyna, including Ivan Franko. The evolution of the meaning became particularly obvious at the end of the 19th century. The term is also mentioned by the Russian scientist and traveler of Ukrainian origin Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay (1846–1888). At the turn of the 20th century the term Ukraine became independent and self-sufficient, pushing aside regional self-definitions. In the course of the political struggle between the Little Russian and the Ukrainian identities, it challenged the traditional term Little Russia (Малороссия) and ultimately defeated it in the 1920s during the Bolshevik policy of Korenization and Ukrainization.

Interpretation as "borderland"
Since the first known usage in 1187, and almost until the 18th century, in written sources, this word was used in the meaning of "border lands", without reference to any particular region with clear borders, including far beyond the territory of modern Ukraine. The generally "accepted" and frequently used meaning of the word as "borderland" has increasingly been challenged by revision, motivated by self-asserting of identity.

In the 16th century, the only specific ukraina mentioned very often in Polish and Ruthenian texts was the south-eastern region around Kyiv, and thus ukraina came to be synonymous with the Kyïv Voivodeship and later the region around Kyiv. Later this name was adopted as the name of the country. The etymology of the word Ukraine is seen this way in all mainstream etymological dictionaries, see e.g. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian; see also Orest Subtelny, Paul Magocsi, Omeljan Pritsak, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Ivan Ohiyenko, Petro Tolochko and others. It is supported by Jaroslav Rudnyckyj in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Etymological dictionary of the Ukrainian language (based on already mentioned Vasmer).

Interpretation as "region, country"
Ukrainian scholars and specialists in Ukrainian and Slavic philology have interpreted the term ukraina in the sense of "region, principality, country", "province", or "the land around" or "the land pertaining to" a given centre.

Linguist Hryhoriy Pivtorak (2001) argues that there is a difference between the two terms україна (Ukraina, "territory") and окраїна (okraina, "borderland"). Both are derived from the root krai, meaning "border, edge, end, margin, region, side, rim" but with a difference in preposition, U (ѹ)) meaning "at" vs. o (о) meaning "about, around"; *ukrai and *ukraina would then mean "a separated land parcel, a separate part of a tribe's territory". Lands that became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Chernihiv Principality, Siversk Principality, Kyiv Principality, Pereyaslavl Principality and most of Volyn Principality) were sometimes called Lithuanian Ukraina, while lands that became part of Poland (Halych Principality and part of Volyn Principality) were called Polish Ukraina. Pivtorak argues that Ukraine had been used as a term for their own territory by the Ukrainian Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich since the 16th century, and that the conflation with okraina "borderlands" was a creation of tsarist Russia. Russian scholars contest this.

Official names
Below are the names of the Ukrainian states throughout the 20th century:


 * 1917–1920: Ukrainian People's Republic; controlled most of Ukraine, with the exception of West Ukraine
 * April–December 1918: Ukrainian State (Українська Держава) or "Second Hetmanate", after the Hetman Coup (Гетьманський переворот)
 * 1918–1919: West Ukrainian People's Republic within West Ukraine; the Unification Act with UPR failed to be implemented
 * 1919–1936: Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic
 * 1936–1941: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
 * 1941–1944: There was no Ukrainian state under Nazi occupation (though one was declared); the territory was governed as Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU)
 * 1941–1991: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
 * 1991–present: Ukraine

English definite article
Ukraine is one of a few English country names traditionally used with the definite article the. Use of the article was standard before Ukrainian independence, but has decreased since the 1990s. For example, the Associated Press dropped the article "the" on 3 December 1991. Use of the definite article was criticised as suggesting a non-sovereign territory, much like "the Lebanon" referred to the region before its independence, or as one might refer to "the Midwest", a region of the United States.

In 1993, the Ukrainian government explicitly requested that, in linguistic agreement with countries and not regions, the Russian preposition в, be used instead of на, and in 2012, the Ukrainian embassy in London further stated that it is politically and grammatically incorrect to use a definite article with Ukraine. Use of Ukraine without the definite article has since become commonplace in journalism and diplomacy (examples are the style guides of The Guardian and The Times ).

Preposition usage in Slavic


In the Ukrainian language both v Ukraini (with the preposition v - "in") and na Ukraini (with the preposition na - "on") have been used, although the preposition v is used officially and is more frequent in everyday speech. Modern linguistic prescription in Russian dictates usage of na, while earlier official Russian language have sometimes used 'v', just like authors foundational to Russian national identity. Similar to the definite article issue in English usage, use of na rather than v has been seen as suggesting non-sovereignty. While v expresses "in" with a connotation of "into, in the interior", na expresses "in" with the connotation of "on, onto" a boundary (Pivtorak cites v misti "in the city" vs. na seli "in the village", viewed as "outside the city"). Pivtorak notes that both Ukrainian literature and folk song uses both prepositions with the name Ukraina (na Ukraini and v Ukraini), but argues that only v Ukraini should be used to refer to the sovereign state established in 1991. The insistence on v appears to be a modern sensibility, as even authors foundational to Ukrainian national identity used both prepositions interchangeably, e.g. T. Shevchenko within the single poem V Kazemati (1847).

The preposition na continues to be used with Ukraine in the West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak), while the South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene) use v exclusively.

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


 * Treated as a diphthong (for example, English Ukraine )
 * Treated as a pure vowel (for example, French Ukraine )
 * Transformed in other ways (for example, Spanish Ucrania, or Portuguese Ucrânia )
 * Treated as two juxtaposed vowel sounds, with some phonetic degree of an approximant between that may or may not be recognized phonemically: German Ukraine  (although the realisation with the diphthong  is also possible: ). This pronunciation is represented orthographically with a dieresis, or tréma, in Dutch Oekraïne . This version most closely resembles the vowel quality of the Ukrainian word.

In Ukrainian itself, there is a "euphony rule" sometimes used in poetry and music which changes the letter У (U) to В (V) at the beginning of a word when the preceding word ends with a vowel or a diphthong. When applied to the name Україна (Ukraina), this can produce the form Вкраїна (Vkraina), as in song lyric Най Вкраїна вся радіє (Nai Vkraina vsia radiie, "Let all Ukraine rejoice!").