Kyiv or Kyiv: Four Letters for Freedom – Panorama

The world is watching Ukraine. TV stations, radio channels, newspapers all over the world report on Kyiv and the other cities where the war is raging. Some also report on Kyiv. Or Kiev. Or even Kyiv. The capital is of course meant, but it doesn’t matter how you spell it, after all there are other problems there, you might think. But it is important to many Ukrainians. For them, a few letters can be a political statement, an expression of independence or of centuries of oppression – not just now, since Russia’s violent invasion. But now especially.

Because the spelling common in Europe – Kyiv, or Kiev – is derived from the Russian term Киев. Kyiv, derived from the Ukrainian Київ, has prevailed in English-speaking countries. Russian and Ukrainian are both East Slavic languages, about as related as German and Dutch. Both languages ​​use Cyrillic characters, but some letters and pronunciation differ.

“Unfortunately, a large part of Ukraine was under Russian rule for a very long time, so the name of our capital was communicated to the outside world as Russians pronounce it,” says Maria Ivanytska in the video call. She is a professor at the Department of Germanic Philology and Translation at the National Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv. Or as she would write: in Kyiv.

You can reach her in Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, where she stayed with a friend after fleeing Kyiv. Ivanytska tells of a colleague who was stuck in a basement in a northern suburb of Kyiv with her two-week-old baby for days, and of body parts lying to the right and left of the street. And all of that resonates when she says, “We have our history, our language, our soul, and we don’t want to be confused with the Russians in the world.”

For years, people and organizations from Ukraine have been campaigning for the Ukrainian transcription of city names. #KyivnotKiev demanded #KyivnotKiev in a campaign in 2018, the umbrella organization of Ukrainian organizations in Germany followed suit, and Ukrainian intellectuals recently repeated the demand. “I used to tolerate it and sometimes wrote and spoke Kyiv myself instead of Kyiv,” says Ukrainian writer and Bachmann Prize winner Tanja Malyartschuk. After all, the Ukrainians also have their own names for European cities. “In view of the war in Ukraine, however, a lot is changing. A conscious use of Kyiv or Dnipro (instead of as in Russian Dnepr, editor’s note) would be a symbol of the fact that people in German-speaking countries are willing to no longer perceive Ukraine as an eternal colony or a satellite of Russia, but as an independent European state that can decide for itself what its capital is called.”

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Russian rulers repeatedly banned the Ukrainian language

Not only has Ukraine’s territory long been sandwiched between great empires – Tsarist Russia to the north, Ottoman Empire to the south, Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Poland to the west – it has often been the scene of battles. Large parts of today’s Ukraine were also under Russian rule for many years. “In Tsarist Russia, the Ukrainian language was banned several times, no Ukrainian books were allowed to be printed, and Ukrainian was no longer allowed to be the language of instruction in schools,” says Ivanytska. At that time, Ukrainian was also called “Little Russian”. Putin quite consciously builds on this when he describes the Ukrainians today as “Little Russians,” whom it is important to bring into his empire.

The independent Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed in 1918, but just a few years later the Soviet Union swallowed up the country. After a brief heyday of Ukrainian, Stalin changed policy. “Ukrainian books were burned again,” says Ivanytska. The language was often derided as a backwoods dialect, and some words, word forms and even one letter were thrown out of the dictionary in the new Soviet spelling. “It was a huge blow to the Ukrainian language,” says Ivanytska. “Your spine was broken.”

Annexation of Crimea – “Now we’ve had enough”

The turning point came with the independence of Ukraine in 1991, also in terms of language policy, although not all at once. “De jure, Ukrainian was the state language, but de facto the Russian language dominated,” says Ivanytska. In order to change that, several governments pushed ahead with consistent Ukrainization in the following years and decades, which continues to the present day. With laws they strengthened the language in schools, in authorities, radio, film, television and the press. As a result, Russian was inevitably pushed back, which was not without criticism. Especially in eastern and southern Ukraine, many people were and still are native Russian speakers. In 2012 there was even a brawl in parliament over a bill allowing Russian as an official regional language in parts of Ukraine. Last but not least, the annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 made even more Ukrainians stand up for their language. “That got the ball rolling, many Russian speakers deliberately switched to Ukrainian,” says Ivanytska.

Gerd Hentschel, Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Osnabrück, considers the efforts to strengthen Ukrainian again to be “understandable and reasonable.” Especially since everyone is still free to speak Russian. “Nobody in Ukraine will be harassed, nobody will be persecuted, and nobody will be killed for speaking Russian,” he wrote in a 2014 statement, even on the rostrum of the Maidan protests one could speak Russian freely. He himself uses Ukrainian transcriptions when he writes down proper names, i.e. writes “Kyjiw” and “Kyïv” when he publishes scientifically. “I think it’s necessary to use the Ukrainian phonetic form as a guide, if only because Ukrainian is undoubtedly the majority language.”

Do you have to change “Nice” too? And “Milan”?

There are three spellings in the dictionary without explanation: Kyiv, Kyiv and Kyïv. The former comes from Russian and is – due to historical custom – the most common spelling in Germany. There are good reasons for this. For example, that everyone understands them, that everyone can pronounce them, that forms do not have to be changed and that the Foreign Office and all major media houses do it that way. The SZ also writes “Kiew”, but mostly uses the transcription from the local language for other places or previously unknown Ukrainian proper names.

Language is always changing, often for political reasons, for example Belarus became Belarus, and its use is not always uniform in the media and public. But where do you start to change, where do you stop? Would Milan then have to become Milano? From Nice Nice?

Some media have recently changed their spelling, that catapult-Magazine now writes Kyiv. “That’s important to us, although it’s more symbolic,” says Ivanytska, “just like when many cities now light up their houses in the colors of Ukraine. It gives us a sense of support, that the world is hearing us and thinking of us.”

The most famous poet of Ukraine is in favor of a uniform, official spelling

When you talk to writers from the country, you realize that opinions are also changing among some Ukrainians.

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“I see the trend that speaking Ukrainian is considered progressive. The number of people using this language is growing,” says Yuri Andrukhovych, the most famous Ukrainian poet. The German-language translations of his books say “Kiew” and “Lemberg”, even though he uses the Ukrainian transcriptions “Kyiv” and “Lviv” in e-mails. “That wasn’t really a problem for me because I thought it was part of the autonomy of the German language,” says Andruchowytsch, who also speaks German, on the phone. Just like in German Warsaw is written and not Warszawa. In the context of the war, however, this takes on a different meaning. He therefore advocates a uniform, Ukrainian spelling, which is officially defined as the only possible form and which authors and editors can adhere to.

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Even the Ukrainian writer Marjana Gaponenko, whose mother tongue is Russian, supports the Ukrainian transcription. Gaponenko lives in Mainz and has been publishing in German for 25 years. Her Ukrainian “has stagnated at school level for many years,” she says. “As a Russian-speaking Odessi native, I am going through an irreversible Ukrainization process these days, along with the vast majority of my compatriots.” The occasion is sad. But without him she would probably never have thought of attending a Ukrainian course – once the war is over.