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Origin of Polyakov surname

A study of the history of the Polyakov surname opens up forgotten pages of the life and culture of our ancestors and can tell a lot of interesting things about the distant past.

The surname Polyakov could come from both a personal nickname and the folk form of the baptismal name.

The tradition of giving a person, in addition to the name received at birth, an individual nickname, reflecting some of his features, has existed in Russia since ancient times and persisted until the XVII century. Individual nicknames, the supply of which was inexhaustible, made it possible to easily distinguish a person from other carriers of the same name. Therefore, nicknames were added to baptismal names, often completely replacing them not only in everyday life, but also in official documents. Sometimes a nickname is an indication of a person's nationality or hometown.

Among ethnic nicknames there was a naming Pole. The basis of this nickname is the ancient Slavic word 'lyakh' in the meaning 'inhabitant of the wasteland.' This is what has long been called Slavic tribes living west of Russian lands. In the Middle Ages, the word 'lyakh', which used to be ubiquitous in the past, took the form 'fields' in central Russia, and later began to be pronounced as it is now called 'Pole.' At the same time, 'Poles' and 'Poles' called immigrants from any territory of the multinational state Rzeczpospolita, located from 1569 to 1775 in the territory of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, most of Ukraine and the western regions of Russia.

According to another version, the nickname Pole could be called a person who lived near the field, plains. Another meaning of the word 'Pole' and the nickname formed from it is the steppe black grouse. Worldly nicknames by the names of birds and animals were very popular among the Slavs.

However, one cannot exclude the possibility of the origin of the name Pole as a folk version of the baptismal name. The ancient Orthodox names Polievkt, Poluyan, Poluvius, Polycarpus, Hippolytus, Apollinarius and Apollon acquired several common diminutive forms in the everyday life: Polya, Polka, Polunya, Polusha, the name Polyak also existed in this series.

In the XV – XVI centuries in Russia, the process of forming surnames as special, inherited clan names began. The generally accepted model of their education did not take shape immediately, but soon possessive adjectives with the suffixes -ov / -ev and -in were fixed as surnames. Initially, they pointed to the father, and their name most often served as their basis, or rather, the form of the name that people used to call this person around. So the descendants of the man who bore the nickname Polyak received the surname Polyakov.

It is impossible to say today when and exactly under what circumstances this naming was first assigned to descendants as inherited, without painstaking genealogical research. Obviously, the surname Polyakov has an interesting centuries-old history and should be attributed to the number of the oldest Russian clan names, indicating the variety of ways the names appear.