Inside The Wonderful World Of Russian Cat Nicknames

They say that in the Inuit culture, there are thousands of words for snow. This is actually not exactly true, but we were pretty pleased to learn that in the Russian language and other similar slavic languages, there are seemingly infinite words for cats. Russian illustrator FILKIT illustrated the types of cats you can find in Russia based on their nicknames, and it's pretty heckin' fascinating. The name translations sparked a fascinating discourse on Twitter.

Suffice to say that people were pretty curious about how their own cats would be called in Russian, and the Russian side of Twitter was happy to make suggestions for fun Russian cat nicknames. Just know, the nickname give to your cat will depend a lot of your cat's head shape. Sorry, we don't make the rules about Russian cat nicknames, although that's a job we'd very much enjoy. So without further ado, we hope you get a kick out of these Russian cat nicknames:

01

via @alexdecampi

Finally, the guide we've been waiting for. In our humble opinion, not enough time is being spent teaching people the words for cat in every foreign language, we for one want to become cat-lingual in every dialect and language!
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02

via @alexdecampi

Hmm, which of these nicknames best describes your cat? We would say koten'ka describes our pet cats the best, or maybe koyandra, but all of these words are super cute and we're going to have to borrow, or more like steal, all of these nicknames to use on our own kitties at home!
03

via FILKIT
04

via @jellyreapOp
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via @alexdecampi
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via @nickdulis
07

$Font - tremendous. @arghcanteloupe Replying to @alexdecampi Yeah my russian friend replied "don't get me started on 'kitten'" so I guess this is fractal$

via @arghcanteloupe
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08

via @alexdecampi
09

via @derpyminstrel
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via @caligulamp
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11

via @opossumcat
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via @htweving
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via @rz00ms
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via @icteridcorvid
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via @heathwindart

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