Ukraine and its capital have grabbed the headlines of all the media in the world because of the Russian invasion and the war. His spelling and pronunciation have been the subject of a more than heated debate on social networks in recent days. It is said that Kyiv or Kyiv? The short answer is simple: Ukrainians call their capital “Kyiv” (ki-iv), and its transliteration into Spanish would start from the Ukrainian word Київ. In Russian, however, it is “Kiev” (ki-ev) from the Russian word Ки́ев.
In fact, Kyiv is the official name of the city in Ukraine, that is, the transliteration of Ukrainian Cyrillic. Both Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages unlike West Slavic languages like Polish and South Slavic languages like Bulgarian and hence the similarities in many words.
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Although this debate has now emerged, it is not new. In 2018, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched the campaign #KyivNotKiev to try to make foreign countries and their media aware of the political nuance of the toponym of its capital. Despite this, most foreign dictionaries continue to list the Russophone spelling.
Publications such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Washington Post’, CNN, BBC, ‘The Guardian’, governments, airports and gazetteers have already adopted the Ukrainian appellation. In Spain, the change has not yet taken hold in the national media. In fact, Fundéu, still recommends its Russian spelling. On social networks, on the other hand, the debate does seem to be starting to sink in and many users are already opting for Ukrainian writing instead of Russian.