Azerbaijan to enable de-Russification of surnames

This piece of news is from February but I just noticed it now. You may have noticed that a lot of surnames in Central Asia are a combination of Turkish and Russian, often ending with -ov or -yev. It looks like Azerbaijan intends to make it easier to change surnames away from this. The actual word used here is millileştirmek, which means 'nationalization', but the effect would be to remove the Russian endings.

From the article:

Surname changing process to become easier in Azerbaijan

The leader of Bakü's Atatürk Research Centre, parliament member Nizami Ceferov, said that the subject of removing "ov" and "yev" at the end of surnames and replacing them with Azeri suffixes had been discussed in parliament. Ceferov noted that changing surnames would not be mandatory, but that there would be a benefit to adopting a system that would make it easier for the changes to take place.

Laws enacted in Azerbaijan in 1993 make it possible for surnames to be changed with a court order, but because the process is a long and costly one it has not seen much demand.

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