For Students

In Eastern European History you can encounter a variety of languages. In the geographical area covered by Eastern European History, you will find Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages, Yiddish, Turkic languages, Hebrew, Baltic languages, Arabic and Persian influences or languages and more. Of course, it is not possible to learn all of these languages, but it is nevertheless necessary to deal with them in a considered way.

Many of these languages use special characters and other writing systems that you will encounter as an Eastern European historian. In addition, renaming and spelling are linked to political or cultural influences or events. Therefore, you must not only take into account the linguistic peculiarities of the respective objects of study, but also sometimes view, question and categorise languages and names as a political issue.

In concrete terms, this means that you will have to familiarise yourself with the respective language(s) and transcriptions of the subject of your research and practise a sensitive approach to them.
For example, it makes a difference whether you are talking about the city of L'viv (Львiв), Lwiw, L'vov (Львов), Lwow, Lwów or Lemberg. The official Ukrainian name of the city is Lʼviv (scientifically transliterated, according to the Duden transcription Lwiw). In the Soviet Union, the city was often called Lʼvov (Lwow) in Russian. The Polish version of the city's name was Lwów, while in the Habsburg Empire, to which western Ukraine belonged for a long time, it was called Lviv. By using a name variant, you are localising yourself and your research. If you speak of Lviv, it is more likely to be associated with the city in the Habsburg Empire; if you speak of Lʼvov, you are using a Russified version of the city's name.

By using a name, you are therefore locating your work and yourself ideologically and/or in an era.
Furthermore, renaming often plays a role in Eastern European history. In the 20th century in particular, places were frequently renamed due to changing political systems and ideologies (e.g. St Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914, then Leningrad in 1924 and St Petersburg again in 1991). If you come across such a case, you should also scrutinise it and be aware of the significance of renaming. You may also come across established, common (source) terms which you may have to transliterate or which are used transliterated.

Question the use of names/spellings and ensure comprehensibility in your work and statements - why do you use a certain variant or spelling and what does it imply? This applies not only to place names, but sometimes also to personal names.

For the transcription of names and terms from Cyrillic languages, either a scientific transliteration or a phonetic transcription is used. This can look as follows:

Cyrillic. Russian: Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв to
scient. Transliteration: Nikita Sergeevič Chruščëv,
Duden: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev or
English translit. (ALA): Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.
The transliteration attempts to match either the phonetics or the phonetics and the respective letter. This makes the names and terms somewhat legible even for someone who cannot read the Cyrillic script or the source language. Eastern European historians do not usually use Cyrillic characters in their texts (unlike philologists), but transliterate scientifically.

Transliteration tables for languages with the Cyrillic alphabet

For other Eastern European languages that use a different writing system (e.g. Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian), you can find further transliteration tables online. You do not necessarily have to be able to read the respective language to work with the transliteration tables. It is important that you use scientific transliteration in accordance with DIN. The special characters required for scientific transliteration are not found in the normal character set for the German language, but must be taken from a special character set (in Word/Windows, for example: via ‘Insert/Symbols’). In many English-language publications you can also find an ALA transliteration that is based on English phonetics. You should use this transliteration if you are writing a text in English.

Important: If you refer to publications, do not ‘translate’ the bibliographic information for your bibliography - neither names, titles nor place names. You can translate the title of a publication and place it in brackets after the original title.

e.g:
Tatʼjana Voronina: Pomnitʼ po-našemu. Socrealističeskij istorizm i blokada Leningrada, Moskva 2018.
or
Tatʼjana Voronina: Pomnitʼ po-našemu. Socrealističeskij istorizm i blokada Leningada [Interior in our way. Socrealist historicism and the blockade of Leningrad], Moskva 2018.
but not
Tatʼjana Voronina: Pomnitʼ po-našemu. Socrealističeskij istorizm i blokada Leningrada, Moscow 2018.

The Polish alphabet uses some characters that do not occur in German and English. These so-called diacritical (=distinctive) characters are not all found in the standard character set for the German language, but must be taken from a special character set (in Word/Windows, for example: via ‘Insert/Symbols’).

List of diacritical characters

Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, whose culture originated in medieval Germany and spread throughout Europe as a result of the persecution and migration of Jews - especially to Eastern Europe. With the waves of emigration in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Yiddish reached the new Jewish centres in America and Israel. Yiddish belongs to the West Germanic part of the Germanic languages, but is not typical of this language family. It is written using Hebrew characters - from right to left. The YIVO transliteration is used.

If you look at the history of the Russian Empire - or parts of it - before 1917, you will come across a different calendar system. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, replacing the Julian calendar in large parts of Europe. A changeover only took place after the October Revolution in 1917. The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar today, which means that Christmas in Russia, for example, is celebrated on 7 January.
If you look at the history of the Russian Empire before or around 1917, you may come across different dates. Depending on the calendar system, the October Revolution, for example, is dated to 25 October 1917 (Julian) or 7 November 1917 (Gregorian). These are not contradictory dates - the Julian calendar runs thirteen days later. In publications you can therefore sometimes find two dates for events, birth dates and the like. Make sure that you proceed transparently and consistently in your own texts if you have to deal with this problem.