Momcilovic, Paurova and Sivka: A Slavic-name pronunciation guide for Kentucky fans
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Final Four impact came from Montenegro, Serbia and Croatia players.
- Herald-Leader consulted Professors Michael Biggins and Victor Friedman.
- Czech and other Slavic diacritics affect pronunciation and syllable stress.
Balkan nations have long shared their basketball talent with the United States.
In fact, Eastern Europe at large has sent pioneering athletes to North America for decades — Hedo Turkoglu (European side of Turkey), Toni Kukoč (Croatia), Nikola Jokic (Serbia), Luka Doncic (Slovenia) and the late Margo Dydek (Poland) stand out among the best of them.
Though none of those standouts played college basketball, international recruiting in Division I has spiked in popularity over time, particularly as the pressure to remain competitive amid the new normal of revenue sharing, NIL and the transfer portal reaches a breaking point.
If you were plugged into Final Four weekend back in April, you likely noticed the impressive talent impacting the floor in both tournaments.
Illinois men’s basketball’s “Balkan Bloc” or “Balkan Five” — Montenegro’s David Mirkovic and Serbia’s Mihailo Petrovic, the Serbian-Greek Californian Andrej Stojakovic (son of Peja Stojakovic) and Croatian twin brothers Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic, the latter of whom played at Kentucky in 2023-24 — helped the Fighting Illini to their first Final Four since 2005.
UCLA women’s basketball won its first-ever NCAA national championship with a roster featuring 2026 Big Ten Sixth Player of the Year and proud Serbian-American Angela Dugalic and Croatia’s Lena Bilic.
Historically, Kentucky men’s and women’s basketball haven’t signed many Slavic athletes; some notable names include the aforementioned Ivisic, who played under John Calipari, as well as Croatia’s Andrija Jelavic, who played under Mark Pope last season, Poland’s Lukasz Obrzut, who played under Tubby Smith from 2003-07, and Czechia’s Dominika Paurova, a Cat since 2024 when she transferred to join Kenny Brooks ahead of his first season in Lexington.
This season, Brooks and Pope have a combined three players of Slavic descent: Paurova, Slovenia’s Ajsa Sivka and the Serbian-American Milan Momcilovic.
Because not every member of Big Blue Nation may have familiarity with Slavic names or languages, the Herald-Leader reached out to Professor Michael E. Biggins at the University of Washington and Professor Victor A. Friedman at the University of Chicago to explain the origins and proper pronunciations of these Slavic names ahead of basketball season.
A short history of Slavic languages
But first, a brief sketch of these languages’ history, courtesy of Biggins.
“Both Czech and Slovenian can point to some of the oldest published translations of the Bible from the original Latin, Greek and Hebrew into vernacular languages,” Biggins wrote in an email. “Even before the appearance of the King James Bible in English — the Czechs in the 1400s with the early church reformer Jan Hus, and the Slovenes in the 1500s with their Protestant reformer Primoz Trubar. And it’s estimated that the Slavic ancestors of all three nationalities settled in their present-day domiciles in the 6th or 7th centuries, not long after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded and settled in England.”
Friedman said the conversion of Slavic-speaking peoples took place starting in 963, which explains why languages such as Czech or Slovene appear in early published translations of the Bible.
“Orthography (the standardized system for writing any given language) is really all based on the 19th century, so it’s not that one (Slavic) language is newer than another,” he wrote “...All the writing systems were chaotic until the 19th century. The 19th century is when all this stuff got sort of organized.”
All Slavic languages are derived from Common Slavic, in the same way Spanish and Italian are derived from Latin. There may be similar conventions between the Slavic languages, but they are far more distinct from each other than they were a thousand years ago, as culture and other factors naturally shift and shape a language over time.
Let’s get down to diacritics
When you look at the technical spelling of each of these names — Dominika Paurová, Ajša Sivka and Milan Momčilović — you’ll notice that they each contain at least one letter carrying a symbol or mark.
If you’ve ever studied Spanish, you may have heard those marks referred to as accents, but an accent mark, say, on the letter ‘á’ is just one example of a larger category of marks called diacritics.
The final ‘A’ in Paurová’s last name, the ‘S’ in Sivka’s first name and the two ‘Cs’ in Momčilović each carry diacritics which affect pronunciation in some way. According to Friedman, you may see the diacritics used, or you may not. (The Herald-Leader’s standard style is to publish names without accent marks.)
“Sometimes people from these countries write the diacritics, and sometimes they don’t,” Friedman said.
How to pronounce Ajsa Sivka
“AH-ee-shah SEE-oohv-kah”
Let’s begin with Sivka, the 2025 first-round WNBA Draft pick whose name Friedman called a “pretty simple” place to start. The diacritic in her first name — that small mark over the ‘S’ — is called a háček (“hah-check”), which means it’s pronounced like “sh” in English. The ‘J’ has a ‘Y’ sound, as in the German word for ‘yes,’ which is spelled ‘Ja.’
“J is the same as Y in these languages,” Friedman said. “In all of these languages, J is used to represent our consonantal Y sound, like in ‘yellow.’”
The “Aj” when spoken conversationally, then, sounds like “eye.” Together with the ‘ša,’ her first name sounds like “eye-shah.”
In each of these players’ names, you’ll find that the letter ‘I’ makes an “eee” sound. Sivka, as outlined phonetically above, sounds more like “see” than “sih,” and, when said at a normal speaking rate, sounds like “seev-kah.”
How to pronounce Milan Momcilovic
“MEE-lon Mome-CHILL-oh-vich”
The sound of the high-profile Iowa State transfer’s first name is shaped by the ‘I’ sitting next to the M, and, like in Sivka, is pronounced like “eee.” UK’s news release when Momcilovic signed indicated that the second syllabule of his first name is pronoucned “mun,” rhyming with “bun.”
Oh look, another háček!
And because you know a háček over an ‘S’ is pronounced like an “sh” sound in English, you might be able to guess that a háček over a ‘C’ is pronounced like “ch” in English.
“And when it’s over a Z, it’s pronounced like ‘zh’,” Friedman said. “Like in ‘garage,’ if you say garage like that.”
But what about the second ‘C’ in Momčilović?
“The second C would have an acute accent over it,” Friedman said. “And that C is very similar to our C. In English, we have one sound, but they have two sounds. One is with your tongue curled back towards the back of your mouth, and one is with your tongue flatter against the roof of your mouth…And you might not be able to hear (the difference), but don’t worry about it. Because there are dialects where even the native speakers don’t even distinguish them.”
Though the ‘C’ is making similar sounds in each of those instances, the two ‘Cs’ are not the same. To further explain, Friedman described how an aspiration, or “puff of air” can sometimes change the meaning of words outside of English.
“The difference between the P in ‘spot’ and the P in ‘pot’ is that the P in ‘spot’ is unaspirated,” Friedman said. “You don’t release any air when you say it. But the P in ‘pot’ is aspirated. And in English there’s no difference in meaning whether you say ‘pot’ (aspirated) or ‘pot’ (unaspirated), right? But there are languages where that puff of air, that aspiration, actually distinguishes meaning.”
How to pronounce Dominika Paurova
“DOE-mee-nee-kah POWER-o-vaah”
Since her arrival in 2024, Paurová has been lovingly referred to as Dom, but if you wanted to say “Dominika” accurately, you’d actually start with a “doe” sound, like a female deer or with the same sound as dough. Then you follow the “I” sound just as you do in Sivka and Milan.
Now onto Paurová; Biggins recommended that you “give two beats to the last syllable of her surname.”
In Czech, Friedman said, the stress is always on the first syllable, so the first half of Paurová sounds like the English word “power.”
“Each vowel in Czech is a distinct syllable,” Friedman said. “As opposed to a diphthong. A diphthong is like the English word ‘owl,’ where you have an ‘ah’ sound, and then you have a ‘wuh,’ that’s not quite a vowel, but sort of a vowel, what we call a semivowel. Whereas, in Czech, the ‘ah’ and the ‘ooh’ are distinct.”
As with the others, you’re likely only going to be cheering these names on game days, or speaking about them casually — because of that, Friedman assured that hammering out each individual distinction is unnecessary.
So give yourself some practice reps and try your best, but remember this:
“If you’re speaking rapidly, it’s not a big deal,” Friedman said.
