Sviatlana
A Slavic name meaning "light". Fewer than 3,000 women in Poland carry it and almost no girls are given it now, so most Poles have never met one.
Sviatlana Pronunciation
What Sviatlana means
Where Sviatlana comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Sviatlana grows from a Slavic root, svet, meaning light. In Belarusian it is the counterpart to Russian Svetlana and Ukrainian Svitlana, three spellings of one bright idea. The Polish gloss stays close to that reading: jasna, świetlista, a name that points toward brightness and not toward any place or object.
The form is younger than it looks. The writer Alexander Vostokov coined Svetlana around 1802, and Vasily Zhukovsky gave it a wide public in his 1813 ballad named for its heroine. A name that reads as ancient light was in fact shaped by poets first, then taken up in ordinary use.
One modern bearer makes the Belarusian spelling easy to place: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who stood in the 2020 Belarusian election. Read it in a Polish class register and the -tl- cluster marks an eastern arrival. The whole name still resolves to one plain word, light.
How many people are named Sviatlana
1 in 8879 women in Poland is named Sviatlana. 2,539 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #633 among female names.