Confused about the Türkiye spelling with the country in the news after a deadly earthquake? You’re not alone
In May 2022, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu requested the UN refer to his country using its Turkish-language name: Türkiye.
The UN agreed, and it wasn’t long before DFAT and the US State Department followed suit.
One month later, the ABC’s internal language committee was asked for guidance as to whether content makers should use the new name. There were mixed views in the room: most agreed audiences wouldn’t be familiar with Türkiye, but that didn’t seem a good enough reason to reject an honest request from an incumbent government – and besides, it would usually be obvious from context what was meant. A compromise solution was offered in our style guide:
Türkiye, Turkey: As of May 2022, the country’s official English name is Türkiye. Preference that spelling wherever possible. It may be necessary to explain the change.
Like all the best guidance, this was immediately ignored. And with fair reason: it’s not often the ABC’s domestic correspondents have to report on the inner workings of Ankara.
This week’s devastating earthquakes, though, have thrust spelling – a relatively minor issue compared to the ongoing natural disaster and recovery efforts – back into public consciousness.
A new old spelling
Turkish is the official language of the modern republic, as well as the main language of most of its residents. Since the early days of Atatürk, Turkish has officially used the Latin alphabet, and spelled the name of the country Türkiye. Several sounds in spoken Turkish are represented using diacritical marks over existing letters of the Latin alphabet; to a Turkish speaker, Ü/ü is a different letter, indicating a different sound, from the letter U/u.
“Turkish has three distinctive vowels that don’t exist in the English language, and English speakers often find it hard to identify or reproduce these sounds,” says Barcu Cevik-Compiegne, a lecturer in Turkish Studies at the Australian National University. “They are extremely important, as some words will mean something else if you change the vowel.”
The Turkish pronunciation is a bit different, it has a vowel sound not present in English. Our rough approximation of it is TURK-i-ye, though that hasn’t caught on as fast as the spelling change.
My spies in the Melbourne newsroom inform me even the Turkish ambassador is still saying “Turkey”.
Türkiye, then, might be a difficult pill for some Anglophones to swallow – but more accurate to the source language. At least up to a point, as Dr Cevik-Compiegne notes: “[This] consistency in spelling is very much based on the standardisation of the Istanbul accent, which is very different from the regional varieties.”
It doesn’t hurt that Türkiye avoids the country’s association with an English word for poultry.
“[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s grievance against the old name seems to be related to the humorous association of the country’s name with the bird,” Dr Cevik-Compiegne says. “Türkiye, it is hoped will warrant more respect for the country and give pride to its citizens.”
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Why not Zhongguo, or Deutschland?
For many ABC audience members – and more than a few employees – the new name rankles.
We don’t refer to Germany as Deutschland, or China as Zhongguo, so why are our Anatolian friends singled out for special treatment?
It’s a persuasive argument on the surface, though perhaps a more fitting analogue would be Ukraine – which, after decades of putting up with an English-language definite article it viewed as a colonial imposition (“the Ukraine”), asked media to stop using it, which they did.
Czechia is a good reference point. Probably the byword for failed national rebrandings, it was pilloried as an awkward example of top-down reformist zeal clashing with the stolidly bottom-up demos.
But again Türkiye is a different beast: rather than asking all speakers to use some focus-grouped new name, the country has merely asked foreign media to respect an endonym Turkish speakers have already been using for going on a century.
What do other organisations do?
It is true that other media have taken a more cautious approach when it comes to embracing the Türkiye spelling: the AP Stylebook, New York Times, BBC, Guardian, and other outlets persist in using the outdated name, for the most part. This does ignore the bulk of English-language Turkish media, which – perhaps unsurprisingly – opt for the Türkiye spelling.
One argument here is that, while language change is fine and natural, public broadcasters in particular should be especially conservative when it comes to foreignisms. This view usually sits in tandem with the entirely opposing idea that public broadcasters should be held to a higher standard.
There’s a steady drip of letter-writers who opine our presenters can’t get their French or Latin consonants right; curious how their ink runs dry when the source language is Khmer or Kurdish.
For her part, Dr Cevik-Compiegne remains philosophical about the new name. “Since the government requested it, and some people find the bird association offensive, I think English-language media should respect that.”
