Why are Ukranian town and city names so (relatively) repetitive?

Question

I've been browsing the map of Eastern and Southern Ukraine over the recent couple of years (looking at where the war is being conducted), and I noticed a very high rate of name repetition: There are multiple towns named "Ivanivka" or "Invanivska" or "Invanivske", and same for "Kostantinivska" (one 60,000-person city in Donetsk Oblast and 5 other small towns). We have a large town named Pokrovske mirroring the city of Pokrovsk - which is not all that far away when you think about it; and if that seems a bit redundant - try the 16 other Pokrovske in Ukraine...

I know there are other places in the world where some of the same names appear more than once, but with Ukraine it seems much more common. So, assuming it's not just my misperception: Why were Ukranian towns and villages named with this redundancy? And - was there a specific period of redundant/repetitive naming, or has it been like this for many centuries?

Answer 1

The reason is that many of these places were named at will at some relatively recent point, rather than having names developed over the course of history. People typically don't show much original thinking when giving names to places at will.

• One wave of such naming was the colonization by Russians in the second half of 18th century following the liquidation of hetmanate and Zaporizhska sech. If you go to the list of Alexandrovkas, say in Donetsk region, most of articles that would have anything to say about history claim that they were "founded in 17** by a [low-rank Russian nobleman] to whom the land was granted" (the area being inhabited before nonwithstanding). This is similar to how San Jose and similar names lead the list of most common place names; most of them are names of colonial settlements.
• There were also some waves of even more recent renamings. For example, several different Aleksandrovkas in Dnipropetrovsk region were actually German settlements and had German names: Billerfeld, Blumenhof, Herzenberg. They all have been renamed by decree, probably along with other German settlements, in the 1920s. Other waves included renaming to get rid of ancien regime connotations after revolution, naming after Lenin, Stalin, and his associates later, then renaming after these associates were executed by Stalin, renaming after de-Stalinization, and most recently de-Sovietization.

Answer 2

An analysis of Open Street Map confirms your suspicion - Ivanivka is indeed a disproportionately popular name in Ukraine. In this dataset, it's edged out only by Oktyabrskiy in Russia (named, naturally, after the October Revolution) and Yeniköy in Türkiye (meaning literally New Village, same as the Czech, Belarusian, Greek, Romanian, and Polish names).

However - they are not towns. There are only a handful of Ivanivkas with a population of over 1000 people. Pokrovsk is only somewhat more popular. It is not an unusual amount - consider the number of Petersburgs or Washingtons in the USA.

The Ivan in "Ivanivka" is none other than our good friend John the Baptist (Johannes in Latin) - transliterated as Ioann in Church Slavonic and later becoming Ivan during the gradual vowel reduction that accompanied the evolution into modern Slavic languages. It would have been an extremely common name and thus an easy go-to when one was functionally illiterate and needed to name a little hamlet. References to other saints like Constantine or Nicholas/Mikola abound as well, for the same reason.

Note that a lot of the place names listed in those links have a long list of alternates. A lot of those alternates would have popped up after 1917 or 1991 when the old (Tsarist or Communist) name suddenly fell out of favor. "Ivan" is the safest possible replacement, politically speaking, and one that is close at hand.

The biggest reason is, of course, that datasets like these could not have existed back in the day, outside of perhaps high-quality census offices. The average person - perhaps even the village headman - would not have known that there was another Ivanivka not too far away.

Answer 3

Duplicates Are Common

You might say that unique place names are the exception, not the rule. In the US, for instance, there are 91 places named "Washington" (towns, cities, unincorporated places, etc.). There are 45 places named "Franklin" and 39 named "Clinton".

The largest cities tend to be unique because they are usually founded in the places with the best resources, and thus were founded first. They were also typically founded when there was much less competition for place names. Whereas, the small towns and villages which share unoriginal, even common names, tend to be more recent (people only settled there because they had to, not because they preferred it), where it is more challenging (and less important) to come up with an original name.

Note that in the US, many of the duplicate town names occur in the same state.

Answer 4

Oklahoma (in fact eastern Oklahoma) has the following similarly-named places:

Tonkawa, Tahlequah, Tecumseh, Terlton, Turley, Tulsa, Talihina, Tushka, Talala, Tiawah, Tamaha, Tullahassee, Tuskahoma. Tulsa, by the way, was formerly "Tulsey", before that "Tulsee", which was probably a shortening of "Tullahassee". However, as you can see we now have one of those too.

What's going on here of course is that these are all Native American place names. Most of them from Muskogean languages. In these languages, "Tul" or similar sounds mean "town", "hasse" or similar sounds mean "old", "humma" is "red". We also have a lot of places that start with "Ok", which usually means waters (the "Okla" in Oklahoma however is apparently "People" in Chocktaw).

These Muskogean peoples were force-marched into eastern Oklahoma in the 19th Century from their homes in the SE USA, which is also covered with similar place names. Most famous is probably Tallahassee, Florida.

Being a completely unrelated language family, it has sounds common to placenames that in English are not only uncommon, but so unusual they stick out like a sore thumb. For this reason they can "all look alike" to the untrained eye. Similarly, to us Okies rather a lot of British settlement names look alike, with all their "ham"s, "shire"s, "ford"s, and "cester"s.

I suspect a similar thing is going on here. Slavic languages aren't totally unrelated to English, but still are going to have sounds they like to use for place-names that look unusual to non-Slavic speakers. If you see a bunch of names that are unusual (to your eye) but like to reuse similar sounds, that's going to stick out.