Corpus-based research on the spelling of the Ukrainian capital in Austrian print media

In 2018, under the hashtag #KyivNotKiev, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine launched an initiative to promote the spelling of the Ukrainian capital internationally and to promote the independence of Ukrainian identity and language. In this article, we will look at how the spelling of the Ukrainian capital has changed in the Austrian print media over the past 10 years. The aim of this article is to establish the number of instances of the Ukrainian transcription Kyjiw in the Austrian print media. The data for the analysis was obtained from a large digital collection of texts provided by the Austrian Media Corpus. The Austrian Media Corpus (amc) is a textual database that makes almost all Austrian print media from the last decades available for linguistic research. The AMC makes it possible to observe Austrian Standard German using large corpora over a longer period of time and to research and document language development in Austrian Standard German on the basis of comprehensive empirical corpus linguistic data. National and regional daily and weekly newspapers, all major Austrian magazines and newspapers are part of the AMC. In our study, the corpus is searched for the tokens Kyjiw, Kyiw and Kiew which would correspond to the German spelling. After the data had been filtered according to the basic populations “word”, “mediatype” and “year”, they were listed in the AMC's concordance. The frequency of use of the spellings Kyjiw, Kyiw and Kiew can thus be determined, recorded in the tablesand displayed in the line charts. It is assumed that the deliberate use of Ukrainian transcriptions of city names in German-language print media would symbolise solidarity with Ukrainians whose identity is directly linked to the Ukrainian language.