The name of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, now the scene of brutal Russian military actions, can be spelled and pronounced in another way, Kyiv. Both usages are correct, but the difference is part of a broader discussion where linguistics, history, and geopolitics meet.
Just as Spanish and Portuguese are different languages ​​with many similarities and use the same alphabet (Roman), Ukrainian and Russian are also different languages ​​that share an alphabet, Cyrillic.
The difference between Kiev and Kyiv arises from the transliteration (when we translate a word from one alphabet to another) of the Russian and Ukrainian languages, respectively. In Russian, the name of the capital is written like this: Киев (pronounced ki-iev). And, in Ukrainian, Київ (pronounced ki-iv).
The choice between Kiev and Kyiv is based on the geopolitical relations between the nations and which language we use as a basis for translating the region. About 800 years ago, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages ​​were one: East Slavic, spoken in the region that is now Ukraine, Belarus and the European part of Russia.
“What we call the Ukrainian language is a language very similar to East Slavic from a phonetic point of view, much more conservative than Russian, which has already derived a lot. But it is a language very influenced by Polish from a lexical point of view. “, explains Lucas Simone, historian and doctor in Russian literature and culture from USP.
The specialist says that these lexical and phonetic differences, which emerged gradually, made it common for there to be two versions of the same word, a Russian version and a Ukrainian version.
This is the case with the name of President Vladimir Putin (the consecrated Russian version) or Volodymyr Putin (Ukrainian version). Likewise, the name of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Russian, would be Vladimir.
Since the 17th century, when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, it has become common to export Ukrainian city names in Russian versions. In addition, in the tsarist period (1547-1917), the Ukrainian language was heavily persecuted by the regime, even banned.
In the case of the 20th century, when Ukraine was mostly under Moscow’s rule, the “language question” was dealt with in different ways by the Soviet Union. In the first decade, there was a period of defense of the national languages ​​and customs of the different territories. Then comes the “Russification period”, in which the Ukrainian language loses ground, especially in large cities.
This internationalization of Russian versions is what makes us use Kiev in Brazil, transliterating Russian. It is the spelling adopted by the sheet.
The debate over which use would be more appropriate has gained space on social media in recent days, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the hashtag #KyivNotKiev (Kyiv, not Kiev) was used on social media in demonstrations of support for Ukraine.
The hashtag is actually the slogan of a campaign by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine that began in 2018 and aimed, among other things, to strengthen Ukrainian identity on the international stage, detaching it from Russia.
One of the objectives of the initiative was to convince foreign media and state agencies, as well as airports, to adopt the Ukrainian spelling, Kyiv, to refer to the capital.
It took effect. Major English-language newspapers such as The New York Times, The Economist and The Guardian have standardized the use of Kyiv in their newsrooms. The US government also officially adopted the Ukrainian designation a year after the start of the campaign.
“For the geopolitical question, language was used as a factor of agglutination of nationalist ideas in the 19th century and is one of the main points of support for Ukraine as an independent state today”, says Simone.
“The fact that there is a language other than Russian is one of the factors that justify the existence of this state. That’s why there was a strong attempt to Ukrainianize the population after independence.” [de 1991]similar to the successful processes in Israel and unsuccessful in Ireland, of trying to introduce a language that was in decline”, he adds.
In the post below, from 2020, the official profile of the government of Ukraine on Twitter explains the difference between the spellings of the capital and asks CNN to adopt the Ukrainian wording. “That Soviet-style Kiev is crazy,” reads the post, which also claims that “most airports and media outlets” use “Kyiv” and that Facebook had recently adopted it.
Finally, Simone points out that there is a lot of doubt regarding the “Russian-speaking minorities” or “Ukrainian-speaking majority”. That’s not the question.
“For us Brazilians, the difficulty in understanding this difference in language is because we live in a country where legal belonging occurs through birth. In Europe none of this is valid, the legal principle is of descent: the person belongs to the nationality of his ancestors”, he explains.
Kiev, for example, is a city where Russian is mostly spoken, but people still understand each other as Ukrainians. Thus, the language-based dispute is not about a speaking minority or majority, but about the assertion of an independent Ukrainian national identity.
