In March, Ukraine asked the world to practice its spelling.
"High time to finally discard the outdated Soviet spelling of our cities and adopt the correct Ukrainian form," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a tweet, adding the hashtag #KyivNotKiev.
As the war between Russia and Ukraine rages in its second month, a leader's focus on spelling might seem trivial. But Ukrainian language experts said the distinctions between Russian and Ukrainian spellings and pronunciations, particularly of cities, are vital to recognizing the two countries as separate.
"The way a place name is spelled has far-reaching political implications, particularly in the context of two countries, one of which is an imperial metropolis and another one that used to be its colony," said Yuri Shevchuk, a Ukrainian language lecturer at Columbia University with expertise in languages' ties to culture, identity and politics.
Here's what you need to know about the distinctions.
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Languages at odds
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Russia – then known as Muscovy – and Ukraine's cultures grew closer, Shevchuk said. Threatened by that, Muscovite czars ordered Ukrainian Gospels be deemed heretical. More than 150 laws and rules were passed aimed at prohibiting and disappearing Ukrainian language from public use.
"The Ukrainian language was viewed as something hostile, as something to be destroyed," Shevchuk said. "The history of Russian-Ukrainian relations has always, for centuries, been a history of culture war."
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Unlike other colonizing empires, such as Britain or France, Russia didn't simply ban public use of the Ukrainian language. It sought to take it apart.
Russia interfered with the inner structure of the Ukrainian language, trying to bring it closer to the Russian language at the levels of phonetics, vocabulary and syntax. For example, Ukrainian has a vocative case – the noun or pronoun used to address a person directly – while Russian does not. In the early 1930s, Russia declared there was no need to use the vocative case, causing generations of Ukrainians to learn the language without using it, despite its presence in classical Ukrainian writings, Shevchuk said; that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Russia's intent, Shevchuk said, was to strip Ukrainians of anything that made the language interesting, attractive or unique.
"Then, Ukrainians themselves would decide 'independently' or 'voluntarily' to switch from Ukrainian to Russian, because Ukrainian is a poor, pale simulacrum of Russian, lacking prestige and lacking political and symbolic capital – and Russian having it all galore," he said.
Cities' names
Russia's actions against the Ukrainian language and historical status affected city names.
Many of Ukraine's cities are named after saints or rulers. To make names possessive, Ukrainian adds an -iv while Russian adds an -ov or -ev, because of a 12th-century sound change in Ukrainian that didn't occur in Russian, according to Michael Flier, professor of Ukrainian philology at Harvard University.
Take Kyiv: The founder of Ukraine's capital was named Kyi in Ukrainian, or Kiy in Russian. So Kyi's city became "Kyiv" in Ukrainian, whereas it became "Kiev" in Russian.
"Some city names sound differently in Russian and in Ukrainian – say, Kharkiv is Kharkov in Russian; Lviv is Lvov in Russian," said Serguei Oushakine, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Princeton University. "It is like, English Moscow is Moskva in Russian or Paris is Parizh in Russian."
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The Ukrainian city of Odesa is spelled "Odessa" in Russian.
"There are two different pronunciations, but since history will show you that it was the Russian empire that had the attention of the world, (Ukraine) was always in a position not to forge ahead with his own name because the Russians were in charge," Flier said. "And so therefore, it was the Russian spelling, and pronunciation that held true until now."
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Why it's relevant
Though the names of Ukrainian cities have historically been translated from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet to other alphabets, years of tension between the nations and Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February have caused many to question why.
"This is a technical issue, but nothing in language is technical; everything is political," Oushakine said.
Ukrainian became the official state language in 1989, but the Russian spellings of Ukraine's cities persisted. There are often emotional and historical attachments to the names of cities, amplifying the desire to have others get it right. Flier compared the misspellings of cities to the misspellings of names, akin to insisting on calling an American "Pierre" instead of "Peter."
"It's recognition that Ukraine is no longer a part of the Soviet Union; it's no longer under the command of Russia, and therefore, you know, we want to use our own names," Flier said.
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In 2018, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry launched the campaign "CorrectUA" to hold Western media outlets accountable for spelling its cities wrong.
The ministry's online campaign used the hashtag #KyivNotKiev and featured posts with incorrect spellings of Kyiv by The New York Times, BBC and Reuters, according to a news release on the effort.
As a result, those outlets and others, including The Associated Press and The Washington Post, adjusted their style guides to reflect the Ukrainian spellings. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names within the Department of Interior retired the spelling of "Kiev" and adopted "Kyiv." Kiev is considered an unofficial variant name.
"I think it was always the case that in Ukrainian, (city names) were pronounced the way that they're now written, the Ukrainian way, but it's just that Ukrainians always had to play second fiddle to Russia because the Russians were in charge of the country. … It really comes down to just letting Ukraine show itself for what it is – letting Ukraine have its own identity," Flier said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kyiv or Kiev? Why the spellings of Ukrainian cities matter
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