Pronunciation Poise: Kyiv
This city’s spelling and pronunciation have changed in recent years. Do you know how to say it?
What is the pronunciation of "Kyiv," according to Associated Press style?
kee-uff
kivv
kee-eff
keeve
And the correct answer is the fourth option, “keeve.” Both the pronunciation and spelling for the capital of Ukraine have been in flux since the early 1990s based on the Ukrainian government’s preferred transliteration to English and increasing usage. After Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian government began changing geographic signs to spellings and sounds that align with the Ukrainian language rather than Russian, and it has campaigned for other countries to comply. In the case of the changing of the spelling of "Kiev" to “Kyiv,” the campaign accelerated after Russia invaded Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, when many Western news outlets started to comply with this change. Then, in 2021, the campaign to change the pronunciation from “kee-eff,” the Russian form of saying the city's name, to “keeve,” to sound closer to the way it's said in Ukrainian, gained momentum. Consequently, the Associated Press Stylebook changed both its spelling and pronunciation of this city, as well as media outlets like the New York Times and National Public Radio. However, the well-known food dish “chicken Kiev” remains so spelled, just as the Chinese dish “Peking duck” continues to be spelled that way, even though in the case of Peking, the city's name was changed to "Beijing" by China several decades ago.