Many years ago, ILLH KarRC RAS scientists designed a plan to launch a major project: creating a "Dictionary of Karelian Place Names". – It is necessary not only to systematize and publish the results of field, archival, and cartographic research by Karelian scholars over recent decades, but also to widely establish the scientifically grounded, true history and reasons for the origin of settlement names of Karelia to counter the popular interpretations that have become especially widespread with the development of the Internet. For this, a toponymic dictionary is needed – one that people could open and draw all the necessary and, most importantly, trustworthy information, – says Ekaterina Zakharova, Senior Researcher at the ILLH KarRC RAS.
However, it was obvious from the start that implementing the project would require enormous resources, first of all the workload. A fact exhibiting the scope of the effort is that the Institute's toponymic files hold some 300 000 place name records. One can imagine the size of the planned volume and how many years it would take to process this dataset. Therefore, the scientists decided to split the project into stages, with the geographical outlines of each stage prompted by the historical settlement patterns of the local population: Ludic Karelians, Livvi Karelians, Karelians Proper, Zaonezhians, and others.
Ekaterina Zakharova, Senior Researcher, Linguistics Section, Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History KarRC RAS
Karelian researchers took the year 1926 as the starting point and benchmark for their work. In was then, 100 years ago, that the most complete list of settlements in Karelia – totaling 2 852 – was compiled after the All-Union Population Census. This number in the republic today dropped to only about 800.
The Dictionary of Livvi Karelian Populated Place Names contains over 650 entries. Each entry provides both the Russian and the Karelian names of the settlement. The history of each place name is traced by historical sources and maps across five hundred years, from the mid-16th century, showing how the settlement was referred to in different periods, from its first recorded mention up to 1926. The concluding section of each entry suggests an explanation of the name’s origin, helping to recover the names of the founders and earliest residents of many villages and to expose some aspects of the local history and geography. The reasons for local people to name a place in a certain way many centuries ago can often be inferred from the cartographic characteristics – what the place looks like in the landscape and on the map.
Irma Mullonen, RAS Corr. Fellow, Professor, Chief Researcher at ILLH Linguistics Section
As explained by one of the dictionary’s authors, Irma Mullonen, Corresponding Fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, and Chief Researcher at the Linguistics Section of the ILLH, Ludic and Livvi Karelians used a similar algorithm of naming villages, usually by derivation from the names of village founders. However, much depended on how the settlement of Karelia’s territory unfolded. The Olonets (southern) Karelia, e.g., is rich in rivers and people initially settled along riverbanks. Villages were literally “strung like beads” along these rivers and named after their founders. But when people moved away from the rivers and settled farther inland, village names would more commonly reiterate the names of lakes or, for instance, hills, which were usually called selgas.
Importantly, the dictionary reflects a pivotal feature of the Balto-Finnic toponymy of Karelia – its existence in a bilingual format. For centuries, there have coexisted and interacted two ethno-linguistic traditions – Balto-Finnic (Karelian and Vepsian) and Russian, and numerous place names throughout the territory either exist in two languages or have influenced one another.
«Livvi villages from À to Ä: a Dictionary of Populated Place Names»
The dictionary is based on field data held in the Scientific Toponymic Files of the ILLH KarRC RAS. Other important sources were reference books, local-study literature, geographic and historical editions, materials from 16th–18th century cadastral books, 18th–19th century fiscal census records, as well as historical maps from the 18th–19th centuries and many other sources, including contemporary ones. The dictionary is supplemented with schematic maps with division by districts and other rural administrative units (selsovet), detailed tables aligning historical district names with modern equivalents, and more. The researchers at the KarRC RAS have thus compiled exhaustive information on these territories.
According to the authors, the scientific significance of both dictionaries lies in how they reveal the history, culture, and language of our land through place names, preserving a heritage that has otherwise faded from modern life. It is also particularly valuable that these dictionaries respond to society’s demand for understanding its roots, knowing the history, origin, and meaning of Karelia’s place names.
The dictionary will be of interest to specialists as well as to the wide readership eager to learn about Karelia’s history, culture, geography, and languages. It will be a valuable source of information for museums, ethno-cultural centers, and schools. Meanwhile, scientists at the ILLH KarRC RAS are moving on to prepare and publish settlement name dictionaries for Zaonezhye, Pudozh District, central and northern Karelia.