this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Heads up to anyone that might not know, but you shouldn't say "the Congo", because referring to it that was is a remnant of colonialism. Instead, just say Congo. E.g. "there's a war in Congo".
I realise that I'm being peak buzzkill politically correct leftie here, but I only learned this relatively recently, and I want to help out others like me. It still sounds weird to me to say "Congo" rather than "the Congo", but that's part of why it feels important to make the effort to change
Similar for
The Ukrainewhich means “the frontier” in Russian and evokes the history of Muscovite imperialism over their frontier statesThere's no such thing as "The" in both Russian and Ukrainian, but what I've seen happen is pro-russian people intentionally saying "on (the) Ukraine" (as if "on the edge") instead of "in Ukraine" to piss people off.
Huh. TIL Slavic languages don’t have a definite article.
So it’s this grammatical mess of Germanic definite articles attached to a Slavic word and the outcome is politically fraught
I can't speak to all Slavic languages but in mine it's concatenated to the subject rather than being its own word