My understanding is that most residents of Kyiv/Kiev speak Russian day-to-day, and therefore are more likely to use "Kiev" themselves. Russian language ? Russian state
Edit - should revise somewhat. Has to do with slight differences between Russian, modern Ukrainian and older Ukrainian, as well as changes to how Ukrainian is transliterated.
The "Kiev" is the English spelling that has replaced "Kiov"/"Kiow"/"Kyow" variants at the beginning of 19th century. It's closer to Ukrainian normative spelling of the times (?????, which transliterates to Kiev), rather than Russian (????? ~Kiyev). The Russian spelling changed to "????" (Kiev) a full century later.
The whole "Kyiv not Kiev" debacle is mostly a political invention of yet another century later. One language cannot define correct spellings for other languages, especially the ones with different script.
> Using ? quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of ? versus ?? became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies.
Doesn't seem THAT telling to me. Saying "?? ???????" is very common in the Ukrainian language, and lots of Ukrainians use bits of Ukrainian while speaking Russian. I wouldn't be shocked to hear "?? ???????" from a Ukrainian, and I most definitely wouldn't make assumptions about political tendencies based on it.
Ironically, the name "Kiev" would be no less offensive becuase this spelling of the name implies that this is a Russian city, not a Ukrainian one. The official and correct spelling is "Kyiv", see http://kyiv.of-cour.se/ for explanations why.
If a person went as far as ordering a "Kyiv Mule" instead of a "Moscow Mule", I'd assume that they'd be the type of person to care about choosing the spelling preferred by Ukrainians instead of the one preferred by Russians.
In the early days of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians used "palyanytsia" as a shibboleth to detect spies. How well that worked in detecting actual spies is anyone's guess, but you can hear the difference in pronunciations really well if you enter ???????? into Google translate and use the TTS function with Russian and Ukrainian. It's really very difficult for a Russian to learn to pronounce this, but anyone who grew up in Ukraine (even if their first language is Russian and they struggle to converse in Ukrainian, like many older people in the south where I'm from) have no issues with it whatsoever due to many years of exposure to the relevant phonemes.
reply