FOREIGN LANGUAGE INFLUENCES ON THE CREATION OF UNOFFICIAL NAMES OF UKRAINIAN FOOTBALL PLAYERS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of Ukrainian unofficial naming in the football sphere. Among the nicknames of football players, motivated by specific vocabulary, unofficial names of Ukrainian players were recorded, the creation of which was influenced by foreign languages. In the 20th century, when Ukraine did not have its own statehood, the emergence of nicknames of Ukrainian football players was influenced by: in the interwar period – the Polish language in Galicia, the Czech and Hungarian languages in Transcarpathia, which, as languages with state status, influenced the speech of their citizens in official and unofficial discourse; and in the Soviet period – the Russian language, which was not the state language in Ukraine, but its use was imposed in all spheres of public life, especially in sports, which still remains the most Russified. The sources of factual material for the investigation were primarily Ukrainian sports periodicals. Given the intensity of foreign language influences, the article describes the nicknames of Ukrainian football players in accordance with the revealed activity of the influences of different languages: from those that least determined the emergence of unofficial anthroponyms of Ukrainian players to those whose influences were most noticeable. The article demonstrates the main models of creating nicknames for football players using numerous examples – from diminutive-petal forms of names formed on the models of diminutive forms of names in the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian languages, by truncation of players' surnames, based on metaphor and synecdoche, and also clarifies the motivation of unofficial anthroponyms that originate from common names and proper names of other classes.