Have you ever visited France? Or Italy? If so, it’s likely that you flew into Paris, or Rome.  But did you? Or did you fly to ‘Parrree’, with a suitably uvulated ‘r’? Or to ‘Roma’, with its ‘r’ impeccably rolled? And when, in France, you heard the locals talking about visiting ‘Londres’, did you correct them, and point out that the UK’s capital is actually called ‘London’?

I ask, because I’ve recently noticed the country I’ve known all my life as Turkey referred to by TV presenters as ‘Toorkiyeh’. This follows hot on the heels of the renaming of the Ukrainian capital, which English-speakers have for centuries called Kiev, as “Keeeev’.

This conceit seems to be the especially beloved of presenters on the government-funded broadcast services of the English-speaking world – in Australia, SBS and the ABC; in Britain the BBC. I haven’t followed the Canadian or New Zealand Broadcasting Corporations closely enough to be certain, but I’m pretty sure they are in lock-step. Beginning a couple of decades ago with the renaming of Bombay as ‘Mumbai’, of Madras as ‘Chennai’ and Calcutta as ‘Kolcota’, the luvvie tendency of the broadcasting world discovered a gratifyingly abundant source of those little dopamine hits it gets from abasing itself before the ‘brown’ world.

I suppose the habit of repudiating the history of British colonial rule in India is a harmless enough way of advertising one’s virtue, although not a particularly convincing one, but what’s with ‘Keeeeeeev’? The inhabitants of Ukraine may be presently among the world’s most hard-pressed people, but, aside from the fact that they are not even brown, their woes are surely not diminished by having the name of their capital used for the purposes of gratifying the extravagant vanity of the bien pensants of the English-speaking world.

And it’s not as though these preening idiots even get it right. As this Ukrainian chap demonstrates, while the second syllable may not, in its native land, be pronounced ‘eff’ as in ‘Jeff’, it definitely exists, even if only in the form of what in my choir would be called a ‘shadow’ vowel – a sort of ‘uff’. So ‘Keeeev’ is not just excruciatingly pretentious, it’s plain wrong. And even if it wasn’t, why stop at the capital? The whole country is pronounced by its natives ‘Ookraeenah’. No doubt the luvvies will get round to it eventually, once ‘Keeev’ has been so widely adopted that it no longer delivers that little dopamine hit.

As far as the Ukrainian chap is concerned, I doubt if he cares a kopyok – give him a squadron or two of F16s, and I should imagine you’re welcome to call his capital, or his whole country, whatever turns your crank.

But Toorkiyeh? Oh, please…