How to pronounce Ukrainian cities in English 🇺🇦 

CORRECTIONS In Ukrainian Дніпро [dn⁽ʲ⁾iˈprɔ] has the stress accent on the FINAL syllable, not the first. If we follow the same principle I applied to Sevastopol, Kherson, and Bakhmut, where we maintain the same accented syllable as in Ukrainian we should say "nee-PRO" in English.

Amazing pronunciation in ukrainian, even sometimes sounds as native

Being Ukrainian myself, I tip the hat for the correctness and pronunciation 🎩 And yes, please, Kyiv and Odesa! 🫶🏻 We’ll greatly appreciate 🤝🏻

Zaporizhzhia means "Land/Place/Island Beyond Rapids" - in reference to rapids on the Dnipro River. It was the capital of the Ukrainian Cossacks Host - thus they were called "Zaporizhzhian Cossacks".

Now I finally know why Milan is "Mediolan" in Polish, should have figured we took those names from Latin. Although Venice we call "Wenecja", which is closer to "Venezia" in Italian I reckon. And Florence became "Florencja".

As a Ukrainian, I didn’t knew even a half of this information 😅 thanks for amazing video! Watching your videos starting from speaking Latin in Rome

your pronunciations are incredibly good... of all kinds of languages! I'm really jealous of how well you pronounce words in both english as well as other languages! it's super impressive!

Interesting video! I noticed that the media and people in general started saying "Kyiv" instead of "Kiev" when the Ukraine War broke out in 2022 (growing up in the 90s, the Ukrainian capital was always "Kiev" to me). I don't recall any explanation for this shift being explicitly provided. I assumed it was an sign of solidarity and support for Ukraine.

I'm from Ukraine and haven't yet learned all the names of the cities of my own country in English) So, I'm very grateful! 🔥 And by the way, your pronunciation is awesome 👍🏻 maybe even better than ours sometimes 😂

OMG. I am Ukrainian, and I think this guide is perfect. Speaking about the 'historic' vs. 'modern' city names, I always try to learn the way the locals call them: this both shows respect and makes it easier to read departure boards in the airports or at the stations. That is why I was happy to visit Köln (while some may say it is Cologne), Antwerpen (I did not know it is Antwerp) and İzmir (not Smyrna). Thank you for the video!

Fun fact, most western Ukrainian oblast capitals have their separate names in German and/or Polish/Hungarian/Romainan. For example Lviv is also Lemberg and Lwów, while Chernivtsi is also Czernowitz or Cernăuți. And those toponyms are often used within those countries instead of universally accepted versions.

As a proud Zaporižžian, I thank you, polýMathy, for your excellent work and hope it’ll help many stop mispronouncing my city & region’s names 😅 Slava Ukrajini 💙💛 vse bude dobre

There is another city with a "polis" part Nikopol. Enki Bilal named his comic book character after him. Thank you for your work.

I think it often boils down to this: spelling vs pronunciation. Either you keep the ‘proper’ spelling (the endonym) and absolutely butcher the pronunciation (because your own language operates on a different phonological rulebook) or you butcher the spelling in order to most closely approximate the ‘proper’ pronunciation. Some languages are more phonetically analogous and thus require less tweaking, some require great compromise by disregarding either spelling or pronunciation (or by giving up on both and savouring creative ignorance) And then, as you’ve shown, there’s etymology. Very often, foreign versions of a name retain some older spelling feature that was present in the original spelling but was lost in the language of the home country. ‘Florence’ retains the and of Latin ‘Florentia‘ that Italian has lost, ‘Odessa’ keeps the of the Greek root. It’s not all too different for Kiev/Kyiv and its old Ruthenian ancestor. I, for one, admit to having somewhat of a soft spot for maintaining an older and etymologically more faithful orthography whenever possible. But, of course, language adapts to new realities and it serves the people speaking it, not vice versa. In the end, it’s all merely a balancing act between written language, spoken language, history, culture, politics and - most important of all - the great duality of fervour and laziness present in every single one of us.

As a linguistics student, enthusiast of phonetics and native speaker of Slovak, I'm very happy to see this profound and awesome phonetic adaptation of the names. This video just soothes my heart 😂 Thank you! 😁

In my native language (Greek for anyone wondering) we use the names derived from Russian, via other European languages. (Κίεβο for Kyiv, Δνείπερος for Dnipro). We never really changed it to support Ukraine, it’s just that the names have been used for a long time that we never really decided to change it, I guess.

Luke, I… lack for words. That's just incredible, your pronunciation is extremely good, and I'm super grateful for your effort! It's always great to know that a person whose videos I appreciate so much is a true human with a big heart. Thank you so much, hugs to you and greetings to your dearest ones, be blessed and happy! Дуже дякую за це відео!

love to see you do a video on this, i've spent a bit now trying to learn how to say places and words in Ukrainian since it's what my not-too-distant ancestors spoke, also so i can say their names correctly. Ideally i can actually speak it when i visit one day. one thing that ends up being a convenience for me is that due to me becoming aware of the outer world in the 2010s is that i didn't have to learn any new names/switch any

Thank you for the great video Luke! And I really appreciate your choice for the soundtrack!

Most news I hear is in Swedish, so it sounds so unusual when /x/ is pronounced /k/. When romanising Cyrilic, we typicaly write /x/ as .

Thanks a lot for my native city Cernihiv - one of the oldest cities of ancient Rus and modern Ukraine (we will celebrate 1320 y.o. in 2024). Only Kyiv is older (celebrated 1541 y.o. this year) if not to mention the former Greek polices in the south). We pronounce the name of city in Ukrainian more like: Cher'nihif. And even in Russian we say Chyer'nihaf, because Ukrainians do not say hard "g" like Russians (as well as southern Russians also say "h" instead of "g"). Also Chernihiv is near Belarus border so here you can hear some mix of Ukrainian and Belarusian language, which is close to Polessian dialects of Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. That is why Chernihiv is also often pronounced as Cher'nihaw ("w" is pronounced close to English "w"), especially in northern parts of the oblast (close to Belarusian pronunciation "Tshar'nihau"). Belaruses pronounce "Ch" as hard sound like CZ in Polish, while in standard Ukrainian "Ch" is much more milder, and in Russian "ch" is always mild (like ć in Polish).

The largest Ukrainian port city has a Greek name: Οδησσός. It is Odessos in Ancient Greek and Odissos in Modern.

Wow, a huge and amazing work was done in this video. And your Ukrainian prononciation is wonderful. Thank you!

I am very unsure about using voiced palatal plosive for in Ukrainian. This much palatalisation is a characteristic of Czech and Slovak languages for sure. Pointing the nasal release may be your preference, I don't mind that. But palatalised palatal consonant (as you have shown on 6:39) makes zero sense to me

Amazing job you did! Thanks for this video!

There's also a thing that used to happen in (some) South Slavic languages. In historical sources you can find -pol replaced with -polje (in many cases but not all). Polje literally means a field if translated to English. So you can find Galipolje (Gelibolu, Gallipoli, a city in Turkey today), Sebastopolje (Sevastopol), Melitopolje (Melitopol), Nikopolje (Nikopol, a town in Bulgaria, also a town in Ukraine) and so on. Not sure if it happened purely out of similarity between -pol and -polje or why it did at all, but ye, it happened. In recent times and in modern speech i haven't heard anyone using -polje versions (apart from Galipolje but rarely). Great video as allways, Cheers! P.s. Constantinople (Konstantinopol, Istanbul) was weirdly enough never called Konstantinopolje but there is another (South) Slavic name for it, Carigrad (Car/Tzar - Emperor, Grad - City).

A nice and interesting video,it is going to be helpful to English speaking people! And by the way my place of birth is Lugans’k, I lived there until 2014.

As usual a superbly conceived and delivered lesson from Polymathy. I love this channel

Great video! Well explained about Kiev/Kyiv! The one sound that people can't seem to get right is 'zh', despite it being an English sound (treaSure).

Thx Luke, all your pronunciation is perfect! with the only minor error in Berdyansk, Y in this case makes previous D softer like Dʲ.

I tend to prefer to use an h like sound for X, instead of a k like sound. Probably from growing up with relatives from Ukraine who use the original local pronunciations. Note: that place name pronunciations can vary regionally in Ukraine and official spellings are based on pronunciation in Kyiv.

I'd also add that you can often see + shchyna as a name of region instead of oblast

I didn't quite get why English speakers say "k" for "х". I may be butchering, Russian/Ukrainian but I just say it as I'd pronounce "ch/h" in Polish and it seems far from "k". That combined with "zh" transliteration makes my head explode when I see transliterated Ukrainian/Russian cities or names haha

The latter half of "Singapore" also happens to be related to the "-pol" suffix!

Odessa is from Greek Odessos with double 's'. Catherine the Great gave quite a few new-founded cities Greek names through her 'Greek project' on the newly conquered land from the Turks.

We in Ukraine often get confused whether Bakhmut should be stressed on the first or on the second syllable in Ukrainian. Actually, it is a historical name of the city which was renamed back not so long ago. Previously, it was called Artyomovsk after soviet tradition. Nice to see our cities in modern Ukrainianized spelling in English.

All Greek-like names in Southern Ukraine, including Mariupol, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Odesa, Kherson, Melitopol and also cities in Russia such as Stavropol, it was a policy of Russian Empire that had many goals, main ones being 1. Trying to eradicate names that already existed here, especially Crimean names, for example Kefe was renamed to Feodosia and Kezlev was renamed to Jevpatoria 2. Establishing connection to Ancient Greece to cement Russian claims to Constantinople and title of the "Third Rome" I didn't quite understand some of those transcriptions, espessialy that prenasalized palatal /ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ/. It supposed to be /dʲnʲi 'prɔ/, but i guess that was a graphic mistake. As for Rivne, "e" vowel is quite higher than /ɛ/ for absolute majority of speakers, aproaching cardinal /e/ quality as it's unstressed. All vowels in Ukrainian tend to have their quality moving a bit to the centre while not losing distinct quality. Although here's the fun thing - there's ongoing merger of unstressed /e/ and /ɪ/ in unstessed syllables so менé (genative of я "І" unless before a preposition due to stress shift) and минé (third person singular future of минути "to pass, to pass by") are complete homophones /meˈnɛ/. Ukrainians being mad at Kyiv and Odesa has more to do with existing threat from Russia and it's colonization policies then and today to. As oposed to names like Milan and Rome for Milano and Roma there were no active effort from France to destroy Roman and Milanese identities and shut their voices, while here enormous Russification project was happening from 1627 at least, when for the first time Ukrainian books were burn and first print bans were imposed. As to end this here are some Ukrainian place names just to break English speakers minds and tongues in form of fun exersize trying to actually pronounce them: Неветленфолу, Петропавлівська Борщагівка, Зноб-Новгородське, Щекавиця, Ржищів, Монастирище, Фертешолмаш, Тячів

Dont forget about how in some dialects has that [x] like [lɔx] And this is the first time ive ever heard pronounced with a [ʒ]

I could listen to your soothing voice for hours. Besides that, you're such a pronunciation genius 🤗

This is great video thanks. Lukius!

A point about the names. The existance of different names in different languages shows that that place has existed in the minds and mouths of people who speak that language. For example, most large FInnish cities have a Finnish and a Swedish name. The Swedish names are testament to the closeness of the two cultures and the presence of these cities in the mind of Swedish-speakers (and it goes both ways, many cities in Sweden have a different name in Finnish). Finland and Sweden were united in the past. Similarly, Ukrainian cities have their own names in FInnish, Kiev is Kiova, Kharkov is Harkova. Finland and Ukraine both belonged to the Russian empire at the same time.

Thank you very much for the very interesting video ! It seems that final v in Ukrainian words has a [u] realisation instead of a [v] one correct ?

9:58 I'm surprised that you didn't mention that Lyman also comes from Greek. λιμένας - port, dock, harbor.

As a Ukrainian speaker, I would pronounce Sumy the same as summa con laude, with an unstressed schwa at the end

Beautiful video!!! Thank you!

One thing about being a Celt, I do not have a problem with the Cyrillic letter ‘х’, either in hearing or speaking. One interesting thing though, in the orthography of the Ewe language of West Africa, the letters h and x correspond to the same symbols in IPA. However, at least one second generation descendant brought up in the USA has grown up with “Anglo Ears” and wonders why her parents’ languages has to use the two different letters.

There's a nice town of Rzhyshchiv in Kyiv oblast which is good for pronunciation training.

You can also use accent marks to romanize it like š, ž, like how Slavic languages that use the Latin Alphabet do

I like your explanation of exonyms such as Odessa, Kiev or Milan. For that matter English Paris is in the same category as it's not the same as French Paris...nor should it be. Use of exonyms grounds us in historicity and helps guard against linguistic/geography chaos, which is caused by constant attempts at name changing. Use of exonyms has nothing to do with political leanings (it certainly shouldn't), and is the way to go for all languages. I'd expect Ukrainians to use their own names for London, New York or Rome.

Awesome! Top notch Pronunciation👍👍

"Crimea" in Norwegian is just "Krimhalvøya". "Krim" is the name, "halv" means half, "øy" means "island" and the "a" at the end means "the", so "The Krim halfisland" "Halvøya" (half-island) is our word for "peninsula". The word "krim" is also a word we use for crime, as in doing something illegal, although I've honestly only seen it in the context of police investigations and crime stories etc. 11:18 English speakers insistence on treating the "e" at the end of words as silent really is a pet peeve of mine...

Good video. Enlightening, for sure.

Thank you for your work!

Thanks for this video! Дуже велика робота! Дякую!

What did you said at the outro?

I see what you did there with the order of cities. Appreciated

Дуже цікаве та актуальне відео, дякую!

Extremely useful for a Ukrainian learner. Thanks!

Perfect pronunciation! Bravissimo! As a translator in Ukraine, I always struggle with how to render our Ukrainian place names in English. Especially small localities, villages etc. I also hate the official Ukrainian latinization bringing us the monstrous Zaprorizhzhia or Chernivtsi, which look intimidating, so I usually write Zaporizhia, although I don't like rendering Ж as ZH altogether. Latinization of Ukrainian is another hot topic in Ukrainian, and I personally favor the Central European approach, that is Zaporižžia, Čerkasy and Černiwci.

Regarding how Ukrainian is pronounced today overall, the literary language is based on the Upper-Dnipro dialect, some of its features are lack of palatalisation in front of etymological i sounds (that's where Wiktionary got it wrong), for example the word "кіт", where i is formed from o in a closed syllable (кôт), formerly in such words the i would not soften the preceding consonant and it would be pronounced just ['kit]. But the word віра, where i comes from an etymologican yat sound (вѣра), the consonant would soften anyways, [ʋʲirɐ]. This was reflected in Kulishivka orthography which was widely used from 1850s all the way to 1920s by writing the palatalising /i/ as , and the for non-palatalising i. Today's tendency is to palatalise all consonants. Russian language also made changes to some people's speech, this regards devoicing consonants, word-finally and before unvoiced consonants, the most notable example is в, which should become [u̯] at the syllable coda, and not [f]. Other minor things as using [ɨ] for the /ɪ/ phoneme, geminated [ɕː] for expected [ʃʧ], soft [tɕ] instead of [ʧ] and so on.

Cool video! But I would like to ask you about one important topic for me. How to say the "would + verb" in Latin as "I would do it" in English, "я зробив би це" in Ukrainian or "zrobiłbym to" in Polish? Just I use the form often, but I can't find how to use it correctly

Thank you Luke! Great content as always. Greetings from Ukraine!

Thank you for the video

Thanks for the video. I just want to point out one thing: in Ukrainian е and и get heavily reduced in unstressed positions and, because of that, the better (just in my opinion) way to pronounce Суми is to end it with a schwa sound (or with a closed e if English phonotactics allow it). You can at least consider it to be a plausible alternative to your suggestion. We just don't distinguish between е and и in unstressed positions and children constantly mix them up in writing

Thank you very much for the video! As a Ukrainian from Crimea, I was incredibly moved when I saw my tiny hometown Partenit (which is an Ancient Greek toponym) at 0:44!

Very interesting, thanks.

Excellent, especially pronunciation. I hope that TV journalists will see that video - they confuse Kh- with X- sometimes (temptation to read familiar character despite different alphabets).

Thanks for this detailed video! The only thing I might take issue with is that at some point, for maximum comprehensibility you just need to "go with the flow", and I think "seVAStopol" is much more common in American English than is "sevasTOpol".

It is always so confusing for me to hear "X" sound as "Kh". I mean I get it but it takes me a moment to understand which city foreigner is referring to

As a ukrainian, i have to say, when our "x" is transcribed as "kh", pronouncing it as "k" sounds really weird. Like when you called Bakhmut "Bakmut". It just doesn't feel right lol

Excellent video! I should add: for historical purposes, pre-2022 battles, events, names, etc. will still retain their pre-Ukrainian spelling (for example Battle(s) of Kharkov). Historiography for events after the Invasion will have Ukrainianized names (Battle of Kharkiv). This will be to reduce confusion, not to demote the language.

It's simple! Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Yuzhnoukrayinsk and Novhorod-Siverskyi:

Ever since I learned how to say it, Zaporizhzhia has been one of my favorite words.

Duzhe dyakuyu for video. Nineteen minutes of the pleasure.

Speaking a languige like english (before greek, latin, french, spain, russian in europe, hindi, han, or mandarin) made not excuse to being lazy or sniffy to try to learn other's tone's and culture. Just like you teach it. I woulde give the benefit of good will. :)

9:53 regarding Bakhmut, there indeed are two ways of pronouncing the city name, the stress alters. Ultimately in comes from the river of Bakhmutka, which for sure has an accent on U, but it is not that clear for the city itself. Chances are it has always been BAkhmut, and BakhmUt is a hypercorrection which was promoted by journalists back in 2016, based on the river name

This gets even more confusing for other cyrillic users. In Bulgarian, historically we've taken mostly the russian names and for most of them, their spelling in russian as well, because our alphabet fits closer to the russian version of cyrillic. Pronounciation is balkanized a lot, as we lack many of the vowels and palatalizations they both have. We don't have i and ї for example and ь is extremly rare. We are writing Киев, but pronouncing it is closer to what an english speaker would say as Kiev. If i get the orthography correct - we say it as Кiев in urkainian/Киэв in russian. But same as in english, we are lately aiming at adopting more ukraninan names so we have things like Харкив, Днипро, Чернихив comming through which don't look either ukranian nor russian, but that's just our best approximation of spelling to pronounce it more as ukranian rather then russian.

Thank you so much for covering this topic ✨ It is extremely important for us to teach the world to recognise our Ukrainian ways to pronounce those names. Your pronunciation is amazingly accurate, which is not a surprise for me since I hear how flawlessly you pronounce Latin words (always a pleasure for any ear). Just a little correction: your [l] sound is a little bit off in Ukrainian. Through some experimentation I can draw a conclusion that you articulate it a bit too far from the teeth. In Ukrainian, as in other Slavic languages, it's a bit closer to the upper teeth, both the regular and the palatalised one. Hope it helps :) Thank you again for the video!

Heroyam Slava! Thank you so much for caring! While it`s ultimately the business of the native speaker of how to pronounce/write names of our cities, i sometimes can`t help myself but to correct someone on the internet, especially when the name of our capital, Kyiv, is miswritten. But to always be mutually respectful in the matters like this is definitely the key.

Luke.. fascinating video. Do foreigners really understand anglicization and roots or do people just resort to what they feel they can pronounce? Shouldn’t there always be an attempt to call these regions what native speakers do, give or take the transliterations? And with names, is it that difficult to say Vuh-lo-DEE-m’r? Not sure it works the other way around, though. I struggle all the time trying to put words like Indianapolis or Shakespeare into Japanese or Russian, particularly with Russian cases. Clearly, SOME kind of pronunciation shift is needed to make these transitions. Thanks.

I have Ukrainian heritage and I still call it Kiev in English even though I know it is Kiiv in actual Ukrainian. Both are technically correct.

A British person would never say kɜːʼsəʊn... or hɪˈɹəʊʃɪmə for Hiroshima. That's a very American way to say foreign O's and we Brits would never even think of pronouncing it that way

As a native Ukrainian speaker, I can say - your pronunciation is almost perfect :)

Great video, you explained everything very well. As a Ukrainian, I appreciate your work. I am happy that the world finally started seeing us as a separate nation and not a part of russia

i am not familiar with phonetic script. but i would pronounce don-etsk more like a sloppily pronounced english "done"etsk or the german "dann"etsk. like simulating to say an "o" but keeping the mouth open as if saying an "a" and also keeping it short. ... an example came to mind: like dunn in ryan dunn.

Being Ukrainian, I never really understood the "the Ukraine" issue. On the other hand, there is an issue of saying "на Украине" (on Ukraine) which many Ukrainians had a problem with because saying "на" (on) instead of "в" (in) implies that Ukraine is not a name of a country, but of some territory. Many Ukrainians saw this as Russians implying that Ukraine is just a territory of Russia.

I appreciate this video because in the last year a lot of military bloggers started talking about Ukraine. But their pronunciation often distorts the names of cities. If they at least looked at the transcription on the wiki it would be much better.

As a Spanish speaker and regular Wikipedia user, I also got interested in the process of adapting these "new" Ukrainian names to Spanish where the traditional names came originally from Russian. Hispanization may be easier regarding the vowel sounds, though there is no distinct /ɪ/ sound in Spanish, so any "и" (y) will be naturally adapted as an "i" /i/: Kíiv (although Kiev is still widely used), Mikoláiv, Sumi. But Spanish has few consonant sounds, and many Ukrainian sounds will be conflated into just a few spots. In some accents, /x/ will be pronounced as [h], so it can be tricky to transcribe "х" as "j" (/x/) and "г" as "h", so it's common to transcribe "г" as "g" [ɣ~g] or just take the Russian name: Jersón, Lugansk/Luhansk, Chernígov/Cherníhiv. As for "ж", Spanish doesn't have /ʒ/ or anything closer that a strong "y" /ʝ/ sound, hence, Zaporiyia (pronounced [θapoˈɾiʝ(j)a] in my dialect - yep, no /z/ as well), but sometimes we just copy the English "zh" and pronounce it as a regular Spanish "z", as with Brézhnev). Apart from this, the traditional name for Sevastopol is Sebastopol (yes, with a "b", and stressed in the final syllable), however, we do say Mariúpol, but Melitópol/Melitopol can be said both ways. As for Lviv, the traditional name is Leópolis, but it isn't used that much, instead, it will usually be written as Lviv and pronounced as [elˈbiβ̞] (I guess we could have written it based on the actual Ukrainian pronunciation as Luiu or Luiv, it would have been easier to pronounce in Spanish).

I hate Cyrillic transcription using English alphabet. I guess using any European language alphabet other then English would be better. I think we should use something similar to transcription which is used in Serbia.

Дуже дякую! Amazing video

With letter В you overdone your investigation. All the variants are ok for every word. It depends on personal pronunciation, you can always pronounce it as W, or as V or anyhow, it will be ok to understand. In Zaporizhzha firstly you doubled ZH correctly, but then repeated the word several times without those double ZH, that was incorrectly. Rivne you pronounced perfectly 😊 Thanks for this video.

Good video, Luke, as always! There are some things that came to my mind as to a Ukrainian speaker. 1. I didn't really catch on what you meant by mentioning a pitch component to stress accent when you explained about Bakhmut. I could be wrong, but I've been quite sure there were no such thing in Ukrainian, and honestly the variants you pronounced sound kind of the same to me or like just some regular "syntactic" intonation. Maybe while researching you have payed much attention to a thing that is so subtle that I'm not sure it's really there. It might be the samples you've listened to, which often have some over-emphasised pronounciation, not in a very natural way, so to say. Although indeed the primary version and more correct stress here would be on the second syllable, an initial-stressed pronunciation is also common. I think that is due to the fact that the current "new-old" name of the city was reintroduced just seven years ago, being Artemivsk for almost a century prior to that, and the correct pronunciation was not so obvious for everyone for a while. It also might be due to resemblance to the last name Pákhmutov(a), which was on hearing and is initial-stressed, and may also even share the etymology. 2. Speaking of double purpose of the letter Y in transcribing into Roman alphabet, notice how inconsistently it is usually applied. Although there is an offical transliteration system which is used by government for names in passports (and it's in not nearly perfect), the overall usage of romanization is a mess honestly. Look how ZaporizhzhIA and BerdYAnsk are transcribed differently for literally no reason (ironically being in the same region). The usage of Y for palatalization and [j] is similar to what happens in a system for Russian language. For me, the issue here is that in Ukrainian Y=И is far more frequent than Y=Ы is in Russian, and if we apply the same rule in Ukrainian, it would be overloaded with those Ys, and in addition leaving some ambiguity (like in "Pryazovya"). Therefore I prefer the "Polish style" for after palatalized consonants, which are used offically, but these are also ambivalently used for /ja, jo, ju, je/ which leads to such ridiculous (as for me) spellings like Iuliia. Ideally, I would introduce the J for that purpose, which is completely absent from any system for some reason and unfortunately it's not in common practice using it. So it would be Pryazovja, Berdiansk, Zaporizhzhia, Julija and so on, much better I think. :)

Not Ukrainian, but I just wanted to point out that "Kiev" is not really a historical English toponym like Milan and Naples but rather a direct Russian loanword. There is, in fact, a historical English name for Kyiv which is Kyow (borrowed through Polish and German) but, of course, no one has used that one for over a century and there's nothing to be gained by reinstating it. Lviv (often referred to by its Russian name Lvov in the past) also had a couple of interesting historical toponyms that are no longer in use including the German-based Lemberg (which was probably the name an English-speaker would have used in the 19th century) and, more interestingly enough, the Latin-based name Leopolis. While neither of those names are in use (in English at least), people from Lviv are still known as "Leapolitans" in English, much in the same way English keeps the more conservative and Latinate adjectival forms for Venetians and Neapolitans.

[x] of course is used in some English dialects, the classic examplar word being "loch", but also in some circumstances in say, Scouse accents. If people are somewhat familiar with that sound I think they should use it in these Ukrainian places instead of the k-sound you suggest. I do think thats what most/many people from the UK do with the example "Bach" you gave, i definitely wouldn't pronounce it the same as the word "back"

Actually the Ukrainian v should be pronounced as w after the constants so Kakhovka would be Kakhowka as well

Duzhe tobi dyakuyu druzhe. Thanks you so much. Video is made well

There were some old names of cities Херсон - Белиховичі Kherson - Belykhovychi Нікополь - Микитин ріг Nikopol - Mykytyn rih Одеса - Хаджибей - Коцюбіїв Odesa - Khadzhybei - Kotsiubiiv Маріуполь - Домаха Mariupol - Domakha

English has many flavours but locally to me the word coat is not a good example in the North of England as it has a hint of two vowel sounds eg co-at, with two syllables and the road is pronounced ro-ad quite similar to OP Shakespeare. The accents of the Midlands and the North is sometimes like archaeology (Brit here)with hints of Old English, Norse,Cumbric and Gaelic.

It's always best to use endonyms over exonyms, so I'll try to learn the Ukrainian names, but I haven't seen the same courtesy being applied to toponyms of countries being genocided by the US or its allies.

Navajo has the [x] sound also.