ELIMINATING COLONIAL-IMPERIAL NOMINATIONS IN THE STANDARDIZATION OF OIKONYMS

Abstract

The article examines Ukrainian oikonymic renamings of 2023–2025 in two interrelated aspects: as a typologically ordered system of nominative changes and as material for verifying their compliance with the norms of Ukrainian orthography. The object of the study is the oikonymicon of Ukraine, while its subject is the linguistic and nominative mechanisms involved in the standardization of astionyms and comonyms after the removal of colonial-imperial, Soviet, and Russified names.
The relevance of the study is determined by the need for a linguistic analysis of recent renaming practices, in which an official name is regarded not merely as an administrative marker, but as a unit of the onymic system with a specific graphic, phonetic, morphological, semantic, and cultural-memorial structure. The source base of the research comprises resolutions of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on the renaming of populated places, the Law of Ukraine “On the Condemnation and Prohibition of Propaganda of Russian Imperial Policy in Ukraine and the Decolonization of Toponymy”, the governmental procedure for restoring historical names, the current rules of Ukrainian orthography, and materials of linguistic expertise concerning geographical names.
The aim of the article is to determine the typological and orthographic-normative principles of renaming Ukrainian oikonyms in 2023–2025. To achieve this aim, the study outlines the corpus of changed astionyms and comonyms, classifies them according to the nature of nominative transformation, and verifies the compliance of the new forms with the norms of Ukrainian orthography.
The research employs structural-semantic, etymological, historical-comparative, socio-onomastic, and critical-toponymic methods. The article demonstrates that decolonial renaming proper is not homogeneous: it includes de-anthroponymization, de-ideologization, de-Russification of geopolitical markers, restoration of historical names, and secondary local remotivation. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the development of a typology of eight categories of oikonymic renaming transformations, which makes it possible to describe systematically the linguistic-normative, decolonial, restitutive, and remotivational changes in the names of populated places. This approach allows for a more precise delineation of the boundary between codified norm, historical tradition, and the actual use of oikonyms in the contemporary Ukrainian public space.