What's in a nickname?

The Lithuanian language is an extremely difficult one to learn. We're nowhere near being fluent yet, but can hold our own in restaurants and while out & about in the city. One fun thing about Lithuanian, however, are the nicknames everyone has...or more correctly I should say the diminutives each name has. You know what a diminutive is, right? Kind of the "sweet, little..." version of someone's name. Like Kimmy for Kim or Tommy for Tom.
In Lithuanian, however, every name has a diminutive version & all are very commonly used - especially with children. To fit into the grammatical structure of the language, all female names end in -a or -e, while all male names end in -as or -us. So there are two generally used suffixes to make a name diminutive. -ute is added to a female name & -ukas to a male name. My Lithuanian colleagues gave me the name "Kimute" long ago & some who I'm close with use it on a regular basis. You North Americans are probably reading it as "Kim-oot", but in actuality, it is pronounced "Kim-oot-eh" or almost sounding like "Kimootay." Andrew, for example, is sometimes called Andrukas (Ahn-droo-kus). This is the normal way the Lithuanian version of Andrew's name (Andrius) would be used.

Since Ieva is already a Lithuanian name, there's no need to make up a diminutive form like people have done for me. "Ievute" is already well established, and when we're at LCC, she is referred to more as that than in any other way. Remember now, it's pronounced "Yev-oo-teh." There is even a Barbie doll knock-off called Ieva with a miniature little girl version called Ievute. (kind of like Barbie & Skipper.) We're so used to hearing these diminutives that we use them on a regular basis, too. So, if you ever hear us referring to Ievute, you know we're talking about our precious baby girl. It especially works great when singing the Raffi song 'Baby Beluga.' When we sing it, it's "Baby Ievute in the deep blue sea..."

Because Lithuania belonged to the Soviet Union until 1991, there is a large population of ethnic Russians who live in Lithuania. You can usually tell a person's ethnicity by their name, since the Russian names don't have the same grammatical endings that Lithuanian names have. Something that Russian names do have, however, are a lot of nicknames, most of which are used interchangeably with a person's real name. Being unfamiliar with Russian names when I first got here, it took me forever to figure out which nickname went with which real name, as the correlations are sometimes difficult to find.
For example, a common Russian name is Aleksandr (for a guy) or Aleksandra (for a girl). Don't ask me how, but for some reason, the nickname that goes for both guys & girls with this name is Sasha. Sania also works. Hmmm... One that is a little easier to see the connection for is Misha for Mikhail. There's also Tania for Tatiana, Slava for Viacheslav, & Katia for Jekaterina.

And if you think some of the spellings & pronunciations of those first names are difficult - you should see the last names! I set the goal during my first year to at least properly pronounce first names - but I leave the last names to the pros.