Erdoğan talks Türkiye in bid to end jokes over country’s name

For decades, people from Turkey have had to put up with bad jokes involving the bird commonly eaten at Christmas and Thanksgiving across the world. But President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his senior officials are hoping a name change will bring that era to a close.

A request submitted last week to the UN by the country’s foreign minister asked for the nation to henceforth been known as “Türkiye” — pronounced “tooh-key-eh”. It was accepted immediately by the UN, and Ankara is now asking governments across the world to follow suit.

The move is part of a longstanding effort by Erdoğan to boost his nation’s image on the world stage — and bask in the reflected glory back home. Speaking last year, when his officials first publicly floated the idea, Erdoğan said that Türkiye was “the best representation and expression of the culture, civilisation and values of the Turkish people”.

There are definitive records of people who called themselves Turks dating back as far as the sixth century AD. Chaucer, the English medieval poet, referred to a land called Turkye in his poem “The Book of the Duchess”, composed some time around 1370. For much of the last millennium, however, the land where Turks lived was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became officially known as the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (Republic of Turkey) in 1923, when the modern state was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

It is not clear why it ended up sharing a name in English with the bird known in Latin as Meleagris. Academics have suggested that it may be because the fowl, which originates in the Americas, was shipped to England by merchants from Constantinople and became known as the Turkey coq.

The word has also come to connote failure in English, as pointed out by an article published last year by the state-owned media group TRT World that laid out the case for a name change.

The initiative has divided Turkish observers. Ayşe Zarakol, a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge, believes that most people in Turkey would “in principle” welcome a new nomenclature. “It’s not that easy travelling as a person from Turkey in Europe or in the US,” she said, adding that she frequently encountered ignorance and orientalist tropes about her nation of 85mn people. Sharing its name with the bird did not help matters, she added.

Still, the move has received little attention in Turkish media or political debate, with the opposition focused on soaring inflation, growing public discontent about refugees and elections that are due to take place before June 2023.

Ünal Çeviköz, a former diplomat and senior official in the opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), said that the move was a top-down initiative with little relevance. “Nobody is talking about it because they don’t take it seriously, it doesn’t matter,” said Çeviköz. He suspects that Turkey will fail in its efforts to persuade governments and people around the world to adopt it.

Richard Coates, a professor emeritus of Onomastics — the scientific study of names — at the University of the West of England said he expected the new name to be widely adopted. “More broadly you could see it as part of the current trend of decolonisation,” he said. “If you want to position yourself as being in tune with the current political dynamic you will go along with the new term.”

He added: “I think the basic issue is one of politeness. If you say you want to be called X, it’s impolite for me to call you something else.”

There is a long history of countries seeking to change their names, from Persia becoming Iran in 1935 to the decision by the Dutch government in 2019 to stop describing the Netherlands as Holland. Burma became Myanmar at the request of the country’s military junta in 1989 and Swaziland became Eswatini in 2018.

Foreign embassies in Ankara, some of which have already received an official request to switch to the new name, are in the midst of consulting with their capitals to decide whether or not to start referring to Türkiye instead of Turkey.

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was an early adopter, using the new name during a press conference alongside Erdoğan in March. A Spanish official said his country would use Türkiye in English but would stick to “Turquía” in Spanish — just as Turkish speakers use İspanya for Spain rather than España.

Observers have pointed out that a double standard exists in Turkey even as it stresses the need for nations to determine their own names. In Turkish, the name of India (Hindistan) translates roughly as “land of turkeys”. Egypt is called Mısır, which also means corn in Turkish.

Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate widely seen as Turkey’s greatest living writer, told the Financial Times he approved of the government’s push for a name change. “Now, after this decision, when English speakers say Türkiye, they will not think about that bird that is eaten at Christmas. I’m very happy about that,” he said. But he joked: “I hope that the Indian government doesn’t say ‘My God, don’t let Turks think that we are a bird’ and change its name.”