From now, official U.S. communications will spell the name of the ancient Slavic city as “Kyiv,” from the Ukrainian transliteration, rather than “Kiev”
It’s been long in coming, but the United States government has finally decided to start referring to the Ukrainian capital in the Ukrainian way.
From now, official U.S. communications will spell the name of the ancient Slavic city as “Kyiv,” from the Ukrainian transliteration, rather than “Kiev,” which is based on the Russian rendering.
But the change is not rooted in politics, according to John Sullivan, press attache for the diplomatic mission formerly known as the U.S Embassy “Kiev.”
“[This] decision is in keeping with how Ukrainians themselves pronounce the name of the capital, but it’s also in keeping with how a number of international organizations, including NATO and the UN, are now spelling it,” Sullivan told the Post.
Members of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names voted unanimously on Oct. 3 to change the spelling.
The orthographic issue was raised by a reporter at an Oct. 19 press briefing at the U.S. Department of State in Washington. Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey responded that the decision was not a political one. “I would simply treat it as a continuing effort to standardize practice with other international organizations and in keeping with what the Ukrainian government is doing,” Casey said.
Reporting on the spelling change, The Associated Press, a global news agency, said in an Oct. 19 report that it would continue to refer to Ukraine’s capital as Kiev.
The Kyiv Post, founded as the Kiev Post in 1995, changed its name a few years later to reflect the preferred spelling of the Ukrainian government and people, according to publisher Jed Sunden.
Ukrainian became the country’s only official language when Ukraine ratified its Constitution in 1996.
According to Ukraine’s 2001 census, 67.5 percent of Ukraine’s population counts Ukrainian as their mother tongue, compared to 29.6 percent who consider themselves Russian speakers.
Language and spelling are often seen to reflect a deeper geopolitical rift in Ukraine between the country’s EU-leaning west and its pro-Russian east, which has led to the heavy politicization of the related issues.
As a result, English-language news publications, such as The New York Times and The Associated Press dropped the definite article ‘the,’ which used to precede references to Ukraine before the country became independent as a result of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
“This is in line with the English-language usage preferred by Ukraine’s government,” The Associated Press wrote at the time.
Since then, the use of ‘the’ before the word ‘Ukraine’ has been considered politically incorrect, as it implies that Ukraine is not an independent country, but merely a region.
The Economist’s style guide addresses the issue directly: “Do not use the definite article before Krajina, Lebanon, Piedmont, Punjab, Sudan, Transkei, Ukraine.”
Sometimes, however, media publications can be slow in recognizing name changes. The New York Times, for example, took almost 10 years to stop referring to the city of Mumbai by its colonial name, Bombay.
Marta Kolomayets, the program director for the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based NGO promoting democratization, local governance and Euro-integration issues in Ukraine, said that while the U.S. government’s spelling change for Kyiv would probably not mean any significant changes for Ukraine, “perhaps it will make people more aware of the fact that Kyiv is a Ukrainian city.”
She said that since the U.S. government and newspapers made the switch to deleting the ‘the’ from Ukraine’s name relatively shortly following the country’s independence, it shouldn’t have taken Washington 15 years to finally make the switch to ‘Kyiv’ as Ukraine’s preferred spelling for its own capital. She added, however, that the move was encouraging.“If the United States recognizes that Kyiv is Ukrainian, and Ukraine recognizes this itself, then I think that influential news agencies like The Associated Press should recognize it as well,” Kolomayets said.
