In this sense, and given that both "Kyrgyzstan" and "Kyrgyz Republic" appear on the Russian-language version of the basic law, Moscow is contesting Kyrgyzstan's authority to determine how the country is spelled in a language that the two countries share, they complain. Russia's official name for the country transliterates as the "Kirghiz" Republic, with a spelling that features the Cyrillic "и" (transliterated as "i") rather than the Cyrillic "ы" that converts to the Latin "y" in English.Ĭrucially, opponents of Moscow's rendering feel language is no argument for using Kirghiz, or Kirghizia, since the Russian language has constitutional status in Kyrgyzstan alongside the state language, Kyrgyz. Kyrgyzstan's formal title is the Kyrgyz Republic, with Kyrgyzstan an alternative official title. "Because first they don't recognize a name - and then they don't recognize sovereignty," Aidarkhan told RFE/RL. The debate over names is "more serious than it may appear at first glance," she argued. Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital, Almaty, shed its old name, Alma-Ata, after independence, but in Russia the city's official name stayed the same. For me, it is associated with the Soviet Union and the fact that our culture was erased, and that in its place was planted a new one imitating Kazakh culture but lacking any meaning," said Aidana Aidarkhan, an activist. "For other people, Alma-Ata might evoke pleasant, nostalgic feelings. The words "alma" and "ata" translate as "apple" and "grandfather" in English.īut while the city's historical name, Almatau, was likely linked to the region's deep abundance of the fruit, some residents regard the use of the hyphen and the folksy "grandfather" reference for the Soviet name as embarrassing impositions. And that can be a thorny subject for different reasons. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan's neighbor to the north, the country's largest city, Almaty, is still known by its Soviet-era name of Alma-Ata in Russia. In English, an equivalent faux pas is referring to Ukraine as "the Ukraine." The government-led Kyiv Not Kiev campaign in Ukraine helped promote the transliteration of the city's Ukrainian spelling over the Russian version.Īnother sore spot for Ukrainians is the use of the Russian preposition "na," meaning "on" when referring to something happening inside Ukraine, rather than "v" or "in," which is more typically used for sovereign entities. Place names are time-honored points of controversy in former Soviet countries, and Russia's military incursions into Ukraine - beginning with Moscow's seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 - have only intensified these arguments.Īn online campaign begun by Ukraine's Foreign Ministry has helped mainstream the transliterated form of the Ukrainian spelling "Kyiv" for their national capital at the expense of "Kiev," which is transliterated from the Russian spelling. The promoter said the problem became more acute after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent thousands of fighting-age Russians fleeing to Kyrgyzstan last year. "You just have to do an Internet search or watch any number of videos by bloggers who visited our country" to see how prevalent the use of "Kirghizia" is, he said. The petition, which has a few hundred signatures, was blocked for a week after going online in late April, a fact Bakyt attributed to a wave of complaints from Russians as Birtops began promoting the initiative. The We Are Kyrgyzstan browser extension makes its corrections. Russia's most prominent media outlets continue to call Kyrgyzstan by its Soviet-era name.
#Russian transliteration of names download
Users wanting to download We Are Kyrgyzstan as a Google Chrome extension will also find a link to a petition asking all Russian speakers to call the country by its official title, the Kyrgyz Republic, or Kyrgyzstan. "It was kind of our protest that after more than 30 years of independence our country is still being called Kirghizia," Nursultan Bakyt, Birtops's creative director, told RFE/RL of the project. That is a boost to Kyrgyz who find the name an eyesore in the most literal sense, but developers say the project's main aim is to draw attention to what they call an insult to national pride and sovereignty. They scooped their prize for a new web plugin called We Are Kyrgyzstan, which automatically corrects users on any online use of "Kirghizia" - the Russian colonial and Soviet-era designation for their now-independent country - with the word "Kyrgyzstan." The Birtops group from Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek, won a gold medal earlier this month at a long-running regional marketing festival in Minsk called The White Square. ALMATY - A creative collective from Kyrgyzstan has designed a web extension that doesn't so much draw a line under the country's Russian colonial past as run a big red one through it.
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