Russian and Ukrainian are both east Slavonic languages (as opposed to west Slavonic languages such as Polish, and south Slavonic ones like Bulgarian). The reason for the difference between the two is bound up in centuries of linguistic evolution in a region that has fallen under Mongol, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian empires over the past 1,000 years. “Many Ukrainians see this as a sign of respect for their language and identity.”Ġ1:12 Explosions and gunfire across Kyiv during Russian night assault – video “When I meet someone new, I like to pronounce their name the way they want it pronounced in their language, which is why I think it’s right to pronounce it ‘Kyiv’ as close to the Ukrainian as possible,” said Andrii Smytsniuk, Ukrainian language teacher at Cambridge University. The latter, based on transliteration from the Russian cyrillic Киев, became the internationally accepted name through the Soviet period and into the first years of this century, its recognisability enhanced perhaps by the eponymous chicken dish that became popular in the west in the 1970s.īut it is now associated with the Russification of Ukraine, and in recent years more and more publications, governments, airports and geographical dictionaries have switched the spelling to the Ukrainian variant. The short answer is simple: Ukrainians call their capital “Kyiv” (kee-yiv), the spelling, a transliteration of the Ukrainian Київ.
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