Expert: Sergey Feduleyev - 11/16/2003

Question
Hello Sergey,
I have a question about Russian names. I know you can tell the sex of a person by looking at their name - but why do women always have to have and "a" tag on their husbands last name? As well, why do children get their father's first name? (and if it's a boy they add an "vich", or a girl "va"). Thanks for your time :)

Katie. V

Answer
Russian last names have male and female forms because nouns have genders in Russian. Technically is not "adding an 'a' tag", it is "putting the name to the proper gender". For example, if a boy is registered under the single mother's last name, then the 'a' will be removed.
And historically last names' endings are connected to father's names as well. In English you can find last names like 'Johnson' which is 'son of John'. Russian analogue of this last name would be 'Ivanov' which is 'Ivan's (son)' where 'son' is implied and lost in ages. So female form of this would be 'Ivanova' which is 'Ivan's (daughter)'. So you can see that 'a' is not some tag but an adjective's gender-modifying ending.
Now then, many of Russian last names evolved from fathers' names exactly in the way they did in many European cultures. The only difference was that Russians developed last names AND retained fathers' names at the same time. But this is not such a big difference when you think about it.
Now let us look closer at modern father's name usage. In general, you take your farther's name and add '-evich' or '-ovich' to it if you are a boy and you add '-evna' or '-ovna' to it if you are a girl. This thing is called "otchestvo". Why would you need it? It was a Russian solution to the population growth problem. It gives your name more uniqueness the same way that several first names do in Western European cultures. A Russian can traditionally have only one first name and that would create lots of homonyms. So people started to use their father's first name, slightly modified, for additional identification.
In conclusion I would like to say that English traditions seem pretty strange to a Russian too. I was intensively surprised when I first saw "Mr. & Mrs. John Smith" formula. Poor women even lose their first names (*sob*), I thought.

I hope you made it through this quite extensive answer and didn't get bored. Take care!