Why do we say kyiv and not Kyiv?

Comment

The war in Ukraine is also a linguistic war. The capital of the country is actually called “Kyiv”. But be careful, the same dangers threaten as in the gender debate.

Julian Schütt / ch media

For several days now, major German-speaking media have no longer called the Ukrainian capital kyiv. The time et The mirror have made it known that in the future they would rather talk about “Kyiv”. Pronunciation is a challenge for a normal jaw: say something like “Kü-jiv”.

Should we see this as a way of re-educating ourselves in political correctness? The reality seems more complicated than that. Since the country’s independence in 1991, its official language has been Ukrainian. And the capital has since then been called Київ, Kyiv in English and Kyiv in French. kyiv, as it is often called, corresponds phonetically to the Russian name of the city, explains the Spiegel.

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A sudden expression from the dictionary of the inhuman

By opting for “kyiv”, we therefore adopt, whether we like it or not, the language of domination of the Russian belligerents, whose the objective remains to destroy Ukraine’s independence. The Kremlin is waging its war on all fronts, including language. He therefore also seeks to create a barrier to the Ukrainian language.

The government of Volodymyr Zelensky therefore wants us to understand that “kyiv” is an expression from the evil Putin’s dictionary. Since at least 1995, the country has urged the use of Ukrainian script. Apparently, many Ukrainians have since considered the use of the name kyiv as a pro-Russian profession of faith.

Discreet difference

The UN officially adopted the Ukrainian version in 2012. In 2019, three years before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry went on the offensive with the “#KyivNotKiev” online campaign.

Media like Reuters, CNN, BBC, New York Timesthe Guardian or the Wall Street Journal followed suit. In the German-speaking area, things are only just starting to move, perhaps because the German spelling Kyjiw splits languages, unlike the English Kyiv. In the French-speaking world, same fight, the new spelling takes little precedence over the old: the French newspaper Liberation uses Kyiv, just like Euronews or The Press in French-speaking Canada. But these media are largely exceptions.

In Switzerland, the NZZ not following suit at the moment. Eastern Europe expert Ulrich Schmid points out that the difference between Russian and Ukrainian pronunciation is actually not that marked.

In Russian too, the unstressed “e” becomes a pronounced “i”. On the other hand, in Ukrainian, the “K” is articulated in the throat, while in Russian, it is pronounced five centimeters further forward in the oral cavity.

A dissonance above all symbolic

The time nevertheless pleads for change, if only out of solidarity, because Ukraine fights day after day against “the annihilation of its sovereignty and its culture, and above all against the erasure of its language.

Even if the argument is audible, it nevertheless concerns a fair amount of symbolic politics. What the attacked country really needs to resist is money and weapons. Reporting on the war must also remain as clear as possible, and free from verbal pitfalls, as is “Kyiv”.

In this conflict, in which Russian troll factories and their offshoots spread Putin’s propaganda, it is precisely important not to be distracted by secondary linguistic elements. This would amount to playing into the hands of the Kremlin leader. The latter’s propagandists are trying to make us lose sight of who forced Ukraine into this terrible war.

Some recent debates about gender and wokism have shown that it is too easy to focus on words alone instead of considering the real issues behind them. This must absolutely be avoided in the war in Ukraine. It would be too damaging to label a media outlet that continues to use kyiv instead of the unpronounceable Kyiv as pro-Russian.

Translated from German by Valentine Zenker