Are you curious what name to which nation belongs?

It can be said that all people are interested in their roots, the origin of the family and its history. In connection with the global cataclysms that followed the October Revolution, many documents were lost. And now its sources can often be learned only "philologically" - by the composition of the generic name, that is by what name to which nation belongs.

Suffixes in Surnames

The most "speaking" part of this word is, without a doubt, the suffix. So, this morpheme, sounding like "ko," "yakko," "enenko" speaks about the Ukrainian roots of the bearers of the surname, and "ovsk" or "evsk" with equal probability can indicate the origin both from Ukraine and from Poland. With such a suffix, it is necessary to find out which name to which nation belongs, with the help of additional signs. To such belongs the root of the surname, which often indicates which language was used to create this particular derivative.

The number of words that form the surname

To which nation the surname refers, one can fairly accurately know by the number of words from which it consists. For example, the bearers of the proud name Chernobylka are obvious Slavs, such composite genus names are typical for Poles, Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians.

The roots of the "cohen", "levy" and the suffixes "dream", "bain", "strain" also leave no doubt which name to which nation belongs, they undoubtedly point to the Jewish origin of the ancestors, at least in the post-Soviet space (in the case Particle "dream").

Difficulties in determining the origin of the surname

However, you should not trust linguistic studies too much. On the territory of Russia there was a mixture of too many peoples, from which the generic names left some echoes. What surname to which nation belongs, can not be precisely determined, except for very obvious cases - for example, with the ending on "dze". Although here you can make a mistake: you say with certainty that you are a descendant of Georgians before you, and it may well be that the ancestor was a Japanese, who also have such a particle in the names.

And in the recording of names in the old days often involved illiterate people or scribes with unreadable handwriting. So it is quite possible that the bearer of the name Lewinsky had the great-grandfather of Lovitsky, who was simply incorrectly recorded.

What kind of nation is a surname, it is most difficult to determine if there are suffixes "o" or "in" in it. There is a general consensus that such generic names are by definition Russian. At the same time, if the root of the word has no relation to the Russian language, then the family is most likely Tatar or Bashkir.

With foreign names obviously often much easier. The surviving prefix "de" or "le" speaks of the French origin of the genus, German or English roots are also easily recognizable.

Poles were marked in the genealogy with the suffix "chik" or "sk", the Armenians - "yang" and "nts", although the surname that ends with "uni" is also, most likely, Armenian.

Finding Your Roots

In particularly difficult cases, those wishing to establish their origins will have to laboriously dig into foreign dictionaries to find out which language the root of their family belongs to. In this case, do not forget about the diversity of nationalities in the territory of modern, and even more so, pre-revolutionary Russia. Migrations of people and a mixture of nationalities and nationalities can greatly confuse the search and puzzle it with results.