Transliteration is a difficult issue. Everyone accepts that there are different words for the same things in one language than in another, including the original or host language. Nobody thinks saying “Spain” instead of Espana (or, officially, Reino de Espana, or the Kingdom of Spain) is intended as a slight against the legitimacy of the Spanish people or government — though I haven’t asked a Catalonian. One of the wonderful things about English is how readily we English speakers take on terms from other languages: think cul-de-sac, aloha, and tsunami. But names for places prick at sensitive issues of national identity. Don’t mix up the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China.
The matter has become hotter than usual given the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, whose foreign ministry has operated a campaign to get foreign countries and citizens to recognize, per the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs PR project’s name, that it’s “KyivNotKiev.” Pronounce these, respectively, keev and key-evv. The Ukrainian government mandated the change in 1995, but it got little to no international uptake until well after Russian “little green men” without insignia seized Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea in 2014.
Kyiv is the name of the capital city since it derives from the Ukrainian Київ and not the Russian Киев. In fact, the way the Russian “Kiev” is pronounced in English involves a letter that does not exist in Ukrainian locution, which means using the old Soviet term tells Ukraine that it cannot speak the name of its own hometown and Russians can. This cuts deep, even if language is merely symbolic. National identity is itself symbolic, but it starts to feel a lot less symbolic when it is also the basis of a war.
We can quarrel about Calcutta vs. Kolkata or Istanbul vs. Constantinople (personally, I favor Byzantium). But generally, the people who live in and rule a sovereign nation should make the decision, and we should acquiesce. A vaguely memetic tweet from a few years ago notes that, in another Ukraine-related language issue, Ukraine has something in common with Batman: Its enemies call it “the Ukraine,” and its friends call it just “Ukraine.” The reason for this is that the word “Ukraine,” possibly, comes from an old Slavic term for borderland, per a Russocentric view on which, as Putin believes, it is just there to be next to Russia. Calling it “the Ukraine” is using one part of the original term from “the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” a full phrase that denies the real history that has taken place since the Soviet empire fell.
“It’s this feeling that you’re part of another country, that you are a territory of somebody else,” the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America told Time in 2014. Just uttering a word sometimes expresses and affirms a proposition, even if you don’t mean it. Nobody should be held to account for saying anything they didn’t mean, and the correction should be gentle. But it’s worth correcting on this one. And while I am generally skeptical of the project to put the world right by changing the words we use, this is meaningful. Individual people deserve to be called what they wish to be called, and peoples deserve the same.
