2024-01-04 17:41:58
Media consumers have had to get used to many new names for cities and countries in recent decades. Ceylon became Sri Lanka, Burma became Myanmar, Bombay only exists in the name of a cocktail and a rock band, otherwise the Mumbai that was officially decreed in 1995 has prevailed.
Only in Beijing versus Beijing is there still a linguistic competition. Even though the new spelling and pronunciation now dominates in numbers, the Beijing-sayer still seems a bit nerdy.
The fact that Swaziland is now called Eswatino in order to decolonize itself is probably not yet widely known. And it is downright ridiculous that Turkey changed the official English UN version of its name from Turkey to Türkiye in 2022, also because the identical name with turkey was found annoying.
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The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has also brought about some changes.
Hardly anyone still uses the Russian names Lwow for Lviv or Kharkov for Kharkiv, which poses an interesting historiographical problem for the latter city. What should we call the major battles that took place there in World War II? Historical literature still talks about the Battle of El-Alamein or the Siege of Leningrad, although Al-Alamein is the more philologically correct spelling and the city that was besieged at the time is now called St. Petersburg again.
The same problem could soon arise in the Kesselschlacht Kyiv 1942 pose. For years there have been efforts in Germany to replace the Russian name of the Ukrainian capital with the Ukrainian one. However, this is not as easy to implement as in Kharkiv and Lviv, because frequently used and long-established words always have a particularly strong force of inertia working against them.
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Vassili Golod, the ARD studio manager in the city, reported again at the beginning of the year that he was often asked the question in Ukraine: “Why do you spell all the Ukrainian cities correctly, but always write the name of the capital wrong?” He himself says: “Anyone who writes ‘Kiev’ is making a mistake – and so are we.” The journalist Claudius Seidl replied to him at X that it was “the German name” of the city.
But Kyiv is not Milan – a city for which the Germans had to find a name in the Middle Ages because the Stauffers were regularly humiliated by it. It’s not Lemberg either – no Ukrainian has any problems with this German name for Lviv because it simply recognizes that there was also a German-speaking and Jewish history there. Kiev is the Russian name of the city, which we simply adopted because our view of the Tsarist Empire, which was the third largest colonial power in the world, was long influenced by the Russian perspective.
While the Russian city name has been documented and dominated in printed German sources since the 16th century, the Ukrainian name Kyiv or Kyiv has also been known in expert circles for a long time and was primarily used when describing the period before Russian rule or the independence of the country Country of Russia should be emphasized – often by Ukrainians who wrote in German. As early as 1916, the Ukrainian cartographer Stepan Rudnytskyj explained: “The Kyiv Empire, which emerged in Ukraine, included in the XI. Century almost all of Eastern Europe. The old empire of Kyiv is usually called the ‘Old Russian Empire’, just as Charlemagne’s empire is called the Frankish Empire. But we cannot call the empire of Kyiv Russian in the modern sense, just as we cannot call the empire of Charlemagne French.”
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So – unlike Milan or Rome for Roma – a piece of language history that is closely interwoven with 1,000 years of our own German history would not come to a brutal end if we were to use the Ukrainian name of the city in the future. However, the question arises: in which variant?
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock used the spelling Kyiv in 2023. This corresponds to the spelling propagated by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. However, in the German transcription version, the Cyrillic letter в, which appears at the end of the city name in both Ukrainian and Russian, is transcribed as w; the v is the English norm. Incidentally, there is no difference in pronunciation between Russian and Ukrainian that would be noticeable to non-native speakers.
The spelling Kyiv, which Rudnytskyj preferred and which is already used by some German media, would be the more appropriate variant. But one should also accept that not everyone who continues to write to Kiev is supporting Russia’s claim to power. People notoriously overestimate the impact of such linguistic details. Ukraine’s freedom will be fought for with missiles and leopards, not with letters.
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