On January 16th, the BBC Russian Service gave up on the use of the word “Belarorussia”.
The BBC Russian Service has announced changes regarding the use of certain country names. Here is the article in a nutshell.
Starting today, we decided to change the way we refer to some former USSR countries in our articles. Belarorussia becomes Belarus, Kyrgyziya – Kyrgyzstan, Turkmeniya – Turkmenistan, Moldaviya – Moldova and so on.
The controversy surrounding the choice have been around a long time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its former republics, now independent countries, changed their names. New maps were printed, new road signs were placed, and journalists had to decide how to call these states.
In our articles we used to stick to the names used most commonly in the Russian language and recorded in Soviet textbooks. It somehow worked with toponimy, but with the names of countries the ” common usage” argument eventually became weaker, especially when the old and new names began to be used with the same frequency.
There came the time when the new names of the countries became not only a part of the official documents and media materials, but also the preferences of search engine users.
In addition to the search engine trends, we turned to the documents of the United Nations, which also recorded the new names of the countries of the post-Soviet space.
For us, journalists, it is important that our news reached their destination, that it is easy to find and easy to read. We believe that the political preferences of supporters and opponents of a name should not affect the work of journalists.
Therefore, we offer our readers not to seek political agenda in the way the name of the country is used in our materials and look deeper: what the news is about.
