Kiev, Kyiv, Kolkotā: Political Correctness Gone Wrong

Christmas has come and gone and I seem to have been spared the news stories telling us that Christmas has been banned because of political correctness. Perhaps this is because I have not had time to read the Sun at my parents’ house or watch the TV news, or perhaps this annual ritual has finally been abandoned. Needless to say, I used to think these stories were infuriating nonsense designed to stir up anger at the intermingling of different cultures which has been going on in the UK for hundreds, nay, thousands of years.

 Christmas arrived on schedule this year, powered by the ancient impulse to sell as much product as possible. The commercialisation of Christmas is another story entirely, and it’s one which worries me so little that I will not even enter into a discussion of it here.

Exclusive Story: Christmas survives another year

Let’s stick instead with the notion of political correctness ‘gone mad’. I could easily write several hundred words in defence of political correctness. But to what end? I suspect I would be preaching to the choir, so I shall spare you the glowing encomium. To save words, allow me to state plainly as an underlying assumption of this article: Political correctness is a good thing.

However – what’s this, a however? – there is a ‘however’.  Surely I am not going to water down the logic of political correctness by allowing exceptions? I don’t think I am, but I place my trust in my readers to correct me if I am wrong.

The trigger for me writing this article was a letter in the ‘Pedantry Corner’ section of Private Eye, in which eagle-eyed readers write in to correct trivial and miniscule mistakes published in the magazine. The reader in this case corrected the Eye’s correspondent from Kiev, asserting that “[t]he name of the capital, correctly transliterated to reflect Ukrainian rather than Russian pronunciation, is Kyiv rather than Kiev.”

Kiev or Kyiv?

Now, there will be very many Ukrainian citizens, mainly in the West of the country, who resent the history of Russian influence on them and see Russia as a bullying imperial force which still today represents a dangerous threat to Ukrainian sovereignty. They have my sympathy. In the interests of fairness, however, it should at least be mentioned that many Ukrainians, especially in the East of the country, are Russian speakers, and that some of them take a much more favourable view of Russian influence. This is something for the Ukrainian people to discuss sensibly with each other, like adults.

But what I want to argue is that continuing to spell Kiev with an ‘ie’ in English is not a political act and therefore there is no need to change it to Kyiv with a ‘yi’. This is because Kiev is neither a Ukrainian nor a Russian word, but the English word for that city, and has been forever. It is also the English word for a chicken-based dish. Does buying a box of chicken Kievs from Iceland undermine Ukrainian sovereignty? No.

The belief that we should transliterate as accurately as possible the local name for a place into English is quite new and, I would argue, serves the political causes it is designed to promote quite badly. One of the things one notices early on in the course of learning a foreign language is that different languages have different names for places. One of the first questions to be role-played in the language classroom is ‘where are you from’? In order to be able to answer this question, the Londoner learning French must learn the word Londres. If learning Italian, the inhabitant of Edinburgh must learn the word Edimburgo. Conversely, we think nothing of calling the capital of Poland Warsaw not Warszawa, and no one is suggesting that we start calling Cairo al-Qahira, not least because most English speakers wouldn’t be able to pronounce it properly. Speaking of pronunciation, how many English speakers habitually pronounce Paris as ‘pa-ree’ in everyday conversation?

Linguistic imperialism attacking London from all quarters

If anything, this translation is a sign of prestige. The fact that different languages have different words for your home town means that they have heard of it. There is no French word for Kidderminster because historically, no one in France has considered it worth talking about. I wish Kidderminster did have a French name. Perhaps it would be Qui-de-Minèstre.

There is, very rarely, a good argument for switching the name of a place. The Baltic port of Gdańsk used to be known internationally by the German name of Danzig, but since the First and Second World Wars most people prefer to use the Polish name, for reasons that should not take too much reflection to appreciate. But Danzig is still the name used in Germany, and I think it is important that this should be taken as a linguistic-historic fact and not as an act of linguistic aggression by the Germans. In the German language, that is, still, simply the name of the city.

Occasionally, we in this country are lucky enough to have news from abroad broadcast into our homes by the BBC. A perennial annoyance, however, is caused by the newsreaders’ attempts to pronounce the names of faraway places in anything other than plain English. Not only is it highly pretentious, but most of the time they get it dreadfully wrong anyway.

A barbarous English rendition by a BBC newsreader of the Bengali word Kolkat­ā does nothing to recompense the Indians for the imperial past, but does everything to confuse and alienate an English speaking audience who are now unsure whether this is the same place as Calcutta or a neighbouring village, or even what country it is in. The public are hardly going to be spurred to take an interest in the affairs of places whose names are in constant flux and unpronounceable by tongues trained only in making English noises.

This policy (for it is official policy at the Beeb) builds on the existing ignorance of the TV-watching population by adding another hurdle between them and understanding. It is discouraging, frustrating and creates the impression of smug, knowing pomposity that is so unfortunately associated with political correctness. It is counter-productive.

I would therefore like to suggest an alternative term for this overzealous self-righteousness, to distinguish it from the mythical ‘gone mad’ variety. For surely this is none other than ‘political correctness gone wrong’.