Ukraine has been forced to navigate murky political waters ever since a July 25 phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky resulted in an impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump.
But impeachment appears to have also brought a positive outcome in Ukraine’s push for global media to use the correct spelling of its capital’s name: The New York Times has unexpectedly joined the list of global media switching from “Kiev” to “Kyiv.”
“It seems like everyone was waiting for it!” the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States wrote on Facebook on Nov. 18.
The Kiev spelling is transliterated from the Russian language, while Kyiv is transliterated from Ukrainian.
After Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and unleashed a war in the country’s east in 2014, Western media’s continued usage of the Kiev spelling became offensive to many Ukrainians.
As a result, in October 2018, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry launched a social media campaign to try to persuade international media, civic organizations and companies to shift to “Kyiv.”
Throughout the year, numerous airports and companies have joined the “Kyiv not Kiev” wave. Some of the most influential names in the media world have already made the switch, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Guardian and BBC.
Then, public hearings began in the impeachment inquiry.
When Ambassador William B. Taylor, the current top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, and senior State Department official George P. Kent testified before the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 13, many viewers noted that they pronounced Ukraine’s capital more like “KEE-iv” than “Kee-YEV.”
This led the New York Times to raise the question of how to correctly pronounce the Ukrainian capital’s name.
The U.S. outlet noted that both of the officials tended to pronounce Kyiv the Ukrainian way.
In a comment to the New York Times, Yuri Shevchuk, a lecturer in Ukrainian at Columbia University, explained that State Department employees and others involved in foreign policy in Washington try to pronounce the city name in the Ukrainian way out of respect for the country.
Shevchuk also noted that using the Russian spelling of a Ukrainian city’s name is a sign of “old colonialist inertia.”
Almost a week after the story was published on Nov. 13, Shevchuk received a message from the New York Times correspondent.
“Just wanted to let you know your comments really made a difference! As of today, the New York Times will use Kyiv, not Kiev,” Shevchuk quoted the journalist’s message in a Nov. 18 Facebook post.
Andrew E. Kramer, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, also broke the news in a Tweet on Nov. 18.
“The change discontinues a Russian transliteration of the city’s name, though one that had been in wide use in English for many decades,” he wrote.
Since the outlet made the decision, it has published two stories in which it used the Ukrainian spelling, noting that the city is “also known as Kiev.” The newspaper’s recent Nov. 18 story on the impeachment investigation mentions the Ukrainian spelling with no additional information.
Earlier in June, the United States Board on Geographic Names, or BGN, changed its English spelling of Ukraine’s capital. The federal body under the U.S. Secretary of the Interior is in charge of deciding on the uniform standard of place names to be used by the U.S. Federal Government and its agencies.
