Today I was talking about the current events in
Ukraine to a group of students and each time I pronounced the name of the
country I did so hesitantly, which resulted in inconsistent article use and haphazard alternation between Ukraine and the Ukraine.
One of the basic rules of English grammar
states that proper names denoting countries shall be used
without a preceding article. Some common exceptions to that principle are names 1) containing
common nouns; 2) referring to geographical features normally used with articles (seas, mountains, rivers, deserts); 3) some of those referring to regions and 4) plural
names (hence The United States, the Netherlands (just like the Highlands of
Scotland), the United Kingdom, (The) Congo, The Bahamas, The Philippines, the south-east, the south, the Middle East), though it is just
a strong tendency. It should also be borne in mind that singular country names in -land have no article (Holland, Iceland, etc.) but -land /ənd/ is normally unstressed there and treated phonologically more as a suffix than a proper noun.
Given the rules stated above, (the) Ukraine is special for the
following reasons.
First of all, although the exact etymology of the name of the country is uncertain, “Ukraina” is probably an illustrative region denomination meaning “borderland” and containing a common noun. (In fact, the word “kraina” in my mother language means “land” as well.) Therefore, the Ukraine would adhere to the trend stated above assuming the awareness of the original meaning of its name amongst those who dubbed the country the Ukraine.
First of all, although the exact etymology of the name of the country is uncertain, “Ukraina” is probably an illustrative region denomination meaning “borderland” and containing a common noun. (In fact, the word “kraina” in my mother language means “land” as well.) Therefore, the Ukraine would adhere to the trend stated above assuming the awareness of the original meaning of its name amongst those who dubbed the country the Ukraine.
Secondly, the country recently changed its
status from being part of the Soviet Union (the Ukrainian Soviet Republic) to becoming
an independent country after centuries of being considered more a region than a country in its own right. The outcome seems to be that nowadays it is both grammatically
and politically incorrect to say the Ukraine: grammatically because country
names are not used with articles (unless the rules stated above are applicable, which is clearly not the case), and politically, because the country itself has
preferred to drop "the" as a way of linguistically reasserting its independence in official documents, as can be seen in the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine.
Thirdly, the perceived regionness of the name Ukraine seems to be corroborated by the fact it is interpreted as a region description when used with a preposition in the Slavic languages (including Ukrainian and Polish), where different prepositions are used for regions and countries. Apparently, there is now a tendency to officially use the "country preposition" amongst the official Ukrainian bodies. In fact, even in English, the articleless version has been spreading exponentially over the past two decades as the graph below shows.
Summing up, the Ukraine, being an exception to the non-use of article with country names, may now be
considered impolite in English being a marked (=less frequent/atypical/irregular) form: linguistically different
from other countries yet similar to geographical features or regions. Of
course, there is nothing linguistically derogatory in using articles with country names, as occurs in French (with all countries) or German (non-neuter ones) where the use of articles is unmarked (=perfectly regular) and thus causing no alarm. But markedness in the Ukrainian case seems to have been interpreted as discriminatory after the change in the country's status, which is confirmed in the following quote from a BBC article:
"The Ukraine" is incorrect both grammatically and politically, says Oksana Kyzyma of the Embassy of Ukraine in London.
"Ukraine is both the conventional short and long name of the country," she says. "This name is stated in the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence and Constitution."
Ukraine it is, then.
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