Kyiv not Kiev: The (soft)Power of Toponyms
What we call Ukraine’s capital may upset some.
I still remember how Indonesians rigorously responded to Marc Marquez when he misspelled Jakarta as Yakarta on his Instagram post. It is technically not a typo per se because Spanish is his mother tongue, and Yakarta is a Spanish version of Jakarta. This honest mistake should not be a piece of news since A) Jakarta is one of the alpha global cities, so there must be an international variation to the name, and B) by default, there are also various definitive transliterations of Jakarta in another language (you can hover your cursor on Wikipedia if you are curious), including the ones using various letter systems. The Yakarta post is purely an honest mistake because Marquez has no ill intention to taunt his Indonesian fans or, worse, exercise his nationalist power (if any) and ignite an international conflict as he wants to change Jakarta’s name.
Speaking of power and conflict, the toponym has been a great tool to indicate the historical and political forces of who ruled the place. Most well-documented examples are how colonial toponyms spread around the world. The most common themes of colonial toponyms are how they embrace the name of the person associated with power at that time or the place where they originated. Virginia has the ideal example where 50% of the counties still bear colonialist officials’ names and places in England associated with them. Another example, New York has endured several name changes based on who governed the land, even rotating between the Netherlands and English occupants. It started with New Angoulême, a French land discovered by Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano who worked for King Francis I. The Dutch built settlements and incorporated the land as Nieuw Amsterdam, then fell under English control, renamed it New York. Fell again into Dutch possession and became Nieuw Oranje for a year. Finally, Nieuw Oranje was ceded to the British and renamed back to New York as we call it today. Indonesians were familiar with how Jakarta changed its name from Sunda Kelapa and Batavia due to the succession of power. Most modern example? Kazakhstan switched its capital city name from Astana to Nur-Sultan in 2019 to honor its previous leader. The alternating name changes depict just how easy political power has control over toponyms.
Another tendency to concern is the post-colonial movement to rename the colonial toponyms. Besides being essential labels to identify places, toponyms hold emotional, social, and cultural significance for the locals. Colonial toponyms symbolize how physiological and cultural erasure transpired, and there are two main reasons why renaming the places could be the remedy. First, indigenous toponyms store a handful of important information that the next generation of locals can inherit in their futures. It shows how the previous generation perceives nature and its surroundings, recognizes demographic and linguistic structure, and even unlocks the mental wisdom about their heritage. Renaming the places operates as a means to preserve the indigenous culture. Secondly, post-colonial renames are regarded as an act to revise the past injustice from the occupation era, including its systemic consequence that passed on until today. In Deidre Mask’s The Address Book, renaming streets in post-apartheid South Africa became a polemical discussion back in 2007. Proponents argued changing racially sensitive street names can be used as stimuli to correct the inequalities. At the same time, the opponents claimed the Afrikaners’ nostalgia and administrative expediency as grounds to reject the renaming concept.
So, changing a place’s name is not an absurd idea because relationships between places and their residents are organic, mutually affecting, and continuously evolving. If toponyms are subject to change, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names in 2002 suggested that endonymic names are favored. An endonym is the name of a geographical feature in an official context and a well-established common language in the area where the feature is situated — endonym analogs with native or local names since it was widely accepted and used by locals. The rationale behind the 2002 resolution is that exonyms (the opposite of endonyms) are politically sensitive, and their usage in several countries is growing. This resolution confirms how toponym is associated with political authority, nation-building projects and even can be a weapon for soft power via geographical communication, flexing any intangible leverage over a neighboring country.
The Case of Ukraine’s Capital
It is general knowledge that Kyiv (KEE-yiv/KEEV) or Kiev (KEE-ev) serves as the seat of the Ukrainian government. Kyiv originated as a form of romanized Ukrainian Cyrillic (Ки́їв), while Kiev emerged from Russian ones (Киев). From the Rus’ Primary Chronicle legend, Kyiv was founded by four siblings, three brothers– Kyi, Shchek, and Khoryv, with sister Lybid, who lived in Dnieper Upland and built a settlement on the right bank of the Dnieper river. The name itself translates to “Kyi’s place,” it has stood for thousands of years of civilization, including becoming the capital of Kievan Rus in 882, which later became the predecessor of the Russian Empire.
Kyiv is important for both Ukraine and Russia as it is where the Rus civilization was implanted. For Ukraine and Russia, the glory of Kyiv is tied to one central figure: Vladimir the Great, the descendant of Kievan Rus, who served as the Grand Prince of Kiev. He transformed Kyiv from the pagan era into a Christian city, specifically Eastern Christianity, which progressed into an influential religious identity in eastern Europe. Ukraine considers him the founding father of the nation, while Russian sees him as the unifier of all Rus states, including Ukraine and its neighbor Belarus. He became the national symbol of three corresponding countries.
The hiccup in modern times, especially in international communication, stems from how to call the city properly. As I elaborated earlier, the toponym implies political dominance, and Kyiv is significant for both parties. In the middle of a diplomatic, or worse, a military crisis, toponyms may be used as subliminal tools to mislead the general public that a specific location psychologically belongs to another country, propaganda in a more frank word. In this case, both countries are familiar with what constitutes propaganda.
Looking at the historical context between the two countries, there is also a plethora of evidence that shows how the systematic erasure of identity and culture had occurred, including the use of toponymic influence. For example, the russification of Ukraine initiated from imperial rule through the soviet era and even in recent times. The -hrad or -grad suffix on Ukrainian city names implies an imperial Russian-named city that never existed in Ukraine before the imperial rule. Then sovietization in the Soviet era was indicated by the pervasive usage of communist and soviet leaders as city names, and the prominent use of the -s’k suffix. Add spatial and demographic backdrops into the mix; soviet toponyms became apparent in southeastern Ukraine (Donbas region), which was characterized by the rapid urbanization of ethnic Russian in the area, propelled by rising industrial activity (there also an article pinpoints the 1933 Soviet resettlement policy in Ukraine correlates with Holodomor, another clear example of systematic erasure).
In a more modern chronicle, Post-soviet Ukraine began with its independence in 1991, and the decommunization effort started slowly with the public display’s removal of soviet symbols. Culminating in the 2013 Euromaidan protest, the decommunization of Ukraine came at full speed as soviet-toponymic places began to change into Ukrainian names in 2014. Later in 2015, the Verkhovna Rada, the unicameral parliament of Ukraine, passed several decommunization laws. Scholars dubbed it as memory laws to embrace the Ukrainian nationalist wing. Six resolutions from decommunization laws in 2016 mandated at least 3% of populated areas in Ukraine be subjected to toponymy change, including two oblast (Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad Oblast, pending due to the constitutional barriers per 2022) and Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, Dnipro (renamed from Dnipropetrovsk). Aside from controversies around other provisions on decommunization laws (such as censorship and freedom of speech violation), this toponymy revision marked an endonymic movement to embrace Ukraine’s own national identity.
I can’t entirely agree with how inorganic toponymic changes are enforced here. Toponyms are part of the intrinsic value that inhabitants have. A deliberate and systematic attempt at something-ization would be an excellent recipe for erasing the community sense, just like language suppression or ethnocide. If toponyms are subjected to change, let the local consensus decide what best to describe themselves, not what invisible power behind it. Or better, let them flourish and evolve, so the toponymic changes also reflect how the place and people grow.
Back to the Kyiv/Kiev debate, the endonym status of Kyiv is clear: people who live inside and around Kyiv are Ukrainian and call their domain “Kyiv”. Since 1995, the Ukrainian government has also mandated the use of the Kyiv name on every official act. There is also an official campaign, #KyivNotKiev, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine to familiarize the Kyiv transliteration with international identification. The movement is also part of the broader campaign, #CorrectUA, to promote the preferred romanized Ukrainian city names such as Odesa over Odessa, Kharkiv over Kharkov, and Mykolaiv over Nikolaev. This campaign became a critical movement since most international organizations and several major anglophone media still use Kiev variation over Kyiv. The global use of Kyiv became prevalent lately in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The earlier mass usage of Kyiv spelling can be traced to the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. After that, the public perception of “Kyiv” suddenly changed from a nationalist cry to becoming the symbol of Ukraine’s sovereignty. The 2019 Donald Trump impeachment probe, sticking around the US-Russia-Ukraine scandal, also made Kyiv spelling more recognized, at least for the US audience.
Our layman’s usage of “Kyiv” in daily lives is only an inconsequential symbol to support the world’s latest independence struggle. And with the current crisis as a background, the option to use Kyiv or Kiev becomes heavily sensitive after knowing the influences behind both names, even if you prefer to be silent and neutral in the world’s politics. For the golden rule, using others’ endonyms to call a foreign place can indicate respect and courtesy since toponyms reflect the residents’ cultural and historical connections to their home, just like how personal pronouns work. In an international context, requests to others for using the correct endonym also should be a norm because endonym implies recognition of one country’s freedom and self-determination.
After learning about the implicit power of toponyms, I choose Kyiv spelling to describe Ukraine’s capital because the endonym is always correct. Now I am ready to accustom myself to Krung Thep to identify Thailand’s capital and Turkiye (wow, my spell check is active when I type Turkiye) to call that beautiful Anatolian country.
