New Delhi: There are two spellings going around for the capital of Ukraine, ‘Kiev’ and ‘Kyiv’.
Media people in some parts of the world have been pronouncing it as Kyiv (KEEV) and Kiev (Key-EV).
Well, there’s more it than meets the eye. The words have a historical context
Ukrainians call their capital “Kyiv” (kee-yiv). While Russia refers it to as “Kiev” (kee-yev), the transliteration is from the Russian Cyrillic.
Kyiv gets its name from one of its legendary founders, Kyi. According to an Old East Slavic folklore, three brothers named Kyi, Shchek, and Khoryv founded the mediaeval city of Kyiv.
Before Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union (or USSR).
During the Soviet period, the capital city was referred to as “Kiev.” In recent years, however, more and more publications, governments, airports, and geographical dictionaries have switched the spelling to the Ukrainian variant.
When did Kiev become Kyiv?
Following Ukraine’s independence from the USSR in 1991, several regulations were introduced regarding the national guidance for transliterating place names from Cyrillic to Latin alphabets.
Soon, legislative and official acts and documents from Ukrainian officials started using Kyiv. But the Western media continued to use the old Soviet-era spelling, according to a report in Wion.
Hence, in 2018, the # CorrectUA campaign was launched by the Foreign Ministry to promote the official spellings of Ukrainian places in an effort to move on from the Russian derivative of the name. The adoption of the name Kyiv is part of the linguistic battle to legitimise Ukraine as an independent nation
