On the afternoon of June 2, 2022, the United Nations received a politely worded letter from the Turkish Foreign Minister and, with the bureaucratic shrug of a body that has seen everything, agreed to update its records. Effective immediately — from the moment the letter touched down in the Secretary-General’s office — the country formerly listed in alphabetical order between Tunisia and Turkmenistan was no longer to be called Turkey.
It was now Türkiye. Pronounced, helpfully, tur-key-YAY.
For the Turkish government, this was a long-awaited diplomatic victory. For the world’s headline writers, it was a pronunciation crisis. For the bird, it was, presumably, a quiet relief.
What actually changed
The first thing to understand about the rebrand is that, from the perspective of anyone living inside the country, almost nothing changed at all.
In Turkish, the country has always been called Türkiye. It has been called that since the declaration of the Republic in 1923. The word means, roughly, land of the Turks, and it carries the same matter-of-fact quality as Deutschland does for Germans or Nihon does for the Japanese. What was changing was not the country’s name to itself. It was the country’s name in English.
This is a subtler thing than it sounds. Most countries tolerate, with varying degrees of grace, the way other languages mangle their proper nouns. The French do not get visibly upset that the English call their capital Paris and not Paree. The Germans have not lodged a formal complaint about Munich. The Japanese, who refer to their own country as Nihon or Nippon, have made peace with the fact that English speakers stubbornly call it Japan — a corruption, via Portuguese, of the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters for Nihon. The world is full of these polite mispronunciations, and most of the time, nobody minds.
Turkey, however, minded.
In December 2021, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a formal memorandum instructing all government bodies to use Türkiye in international correspondence, asked Turkish exporters to stamp Made in Türkiye on their goods, and launched a tourism campaign called — with admirable directness — Hello Türkiye. Six months later, the United Nations made it official.
The stated reason was that Türkiye better represents the Turkish people’s culture, civilisation, and values. Which it does. But that was not the only reason.
The bird in the room
Let us address what every news article about this rebrand had to address eventually, usually in the third paragraph, often with a self-conscious throat-clearing.
There is a bird called a turkey. It is large, mostly inedible by accident and only edible by considerable effort, and it occupies the centre of the American Thanksgiving table and a respectable percentage of British Christmas dinners. In American slang, turkey also means a flop, a failure, a thing that does not work. That movie was a turkey. He’s a real turkey. The associations, in English, are not flattering. They are barely even neutral.
For a country trying to project a serious image on the international stage — a NATO member, a G20 economy, a regional power — sharing a name with a slightly clumsy domestic fowl is not a help. It is the geopolitical equivalent of sharing a name with your less successful cousin. People understand you are not the same. But the joke writes itself, and it has been writing itself for several centuries.
Turkish officials have, with admirable diplomacy, declined to make the bird the primary reason for the rebrand. The bird has been mentioned, in interviews, as merely one of several factors. This is the same energy as someone explaining that they are leaving their job for several reasons, only one of which is their boss.
The bird isn’t even from Turkey
Here is where the story takes a turn that almost nobody who repeats it stops to appreciate.
The bird called a turkey, in English, is not from Turkey. It has never been from Turkey. It is native to Mexico and the southern United States, where it was domesticated by the Aztecs centuries before any European had heard of it. The Spanish brought it back to Europe in the 1520s, and within a generation it was being roasted at English Christmas tables.
So why is it called a turkey?
Because of an unrelated bird. The guinea fowl, which is genuinely African, had been arriving in England via Ottoman-controlled trade routes for years before the American bird showed up. Anything that came through Ottoman lands was, by lazy English shorthand, labelled Turkish — Turkish coffee, Turkish delight, Turkish carpets, Turkish pepper. The guinea fowl, transiting through the same trade network, became the Turkey cock and Turkey hen.
Then the American bird arrived. To English eyes, it looked roughly like the guinea fowl — feathered, bird-shaped, of a size suitable for roasting — and so they called it the same thing. The name attached to the wrong bird, and the wrong bird kept it.
Which means the country of Türkiye is currently engaged in a careful, multi-year, multi-million-dollar diplomatic campaign to disassociate itself from a bird that was never from there, named after a different bird that was also not from there, by sixteenth-century English merchants who could not be bothered to ask where things were actually from.
It is, when you stop and look at it, one of the most exquisite small comedies in the history of geography.
What the bird is called in Turkish
The joke gets better.
In Turkish, the turkey — the bird — is not called a turkey. It is called hindi. Which means, literally, Indian.
This is because Turkish speakers, presented with this strange new American bird in the sixteenth century, did exactly what English speakers had done a few decades earlier. They guessed at where it was from, guessed wrong, and committed the guess to language. The French did the same — dinde, short for poulet d’Inde, the chicken of India. So did the Armenians, the Italians, the Polish, and the Russians. The Portuguese, going one further, decided the bird was from Peru and called it peru, which it still is in Lisbon today.
So the country of Türkiye objects, reasonably, to the English-speaking world’s habit of calling a Mexican bird by its name. And in its own language, it deals with the same bird by calling it Indian. Meanwhile the Indians, for the record, did not originate the bird either. The bird is from Mexico. The bird has always been from Mexico. The bird would, presumably, like to clear this up.
Is it really about the bird?
Probably not entirely. Even the most charitable reading of the rebrand admits the bird is a convenient cover for a more layered piece of soft-power work.
The change was announced in late 2021, during a period when Turkey was navigating a significant currency crisis, with the lira losing roughly 44 percent of its value against the dollar in a matter of months. Some Turkish foreign-policy analysts noted, with the careful neutrality of people who still wish to be allowed back into the country, that the rebrand might also serve as a useful distraction. A national identity exercise is a cheap thing to launch. It is, importantly, free.
There is also the longer-arc reason, which is more interesting and probably more honest. Erdoğan’s government has spent two decades repositioning the country’s identity, leaning toward an Ottoman-inflected, religiously inflected, distinctly Turkish self-image — and away from the Western-facing, secular republicanism that dominated the twentieth century. Türkiye, with its Turkish spelling and its Turkish sounds, is a small flag planted in that ground. Turkey, by contrast, was a name handed to the country by English-speaking foreigners. Choosing the Turkish word over the English one is a choice, even if it is dressed up as a courtesy.
The renaming club
Türkiye is not the first country to do this, and it will not be the last. There is, by now, a fairly well-established tradition of countries deciding that the name they have been called by other people is no longer the name they wish to be called by.
Persia became Iran in 1935. Siam became Thailand in 1939. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, shedding a colonial-era name attached to the British businessman Cecil Rhodes. Burma became Myanmar in 1989, though large parts of the English-speaking press are still arguing about whether to recognise the change. The Czech Republic adopted Czechia as its short-form name in 2016, with mixed success — most English speakers still default to Czech Republic, partly out of habit and partly because Czechia sounds, to the untrained ear, like a small skin condition. Holland clarified in 2020 that it would prefer to be called the Netherlands, on the reasonable grounds that Holland refers to only two of the country’s twelve provinces.
The pattern is consistent. A country gets called something by outsiders, lives with it for a few centuries, and eventually decides — for reasons usually involving identity, post-colonial confidence, or simple fatigue — that it would rather be called what it calls itself.
It is, in the end, a very small piece of dignity to ask for. The polite thing to do, when somebody tells you their actual name, is to use it.
The umlaut
The one remaining problem with the rebrand is, of course, the umlaut.
That little pair of dots above the u — formally a diaeresis, in this case marking a vowel sound that does not exist in English — is doing more diplomatic work than it deserves. To get Türkiye into general English usage, you have to convince newspaper sub-editors, search engines, autocorrect dictionaries, headline algorithms, and roughly four billion casual typists to learn a keystroke they have never needed before.
This is, in practice, a slow business. Most international news organisations have adopted the new name in their style guides. Many still slip back into Turkey when speed and convenience demand it. The umlaut, on most English keyboards, requires a small ceremonial pause — a held key, a menu, a copy-paste — and small ceremonial pauses are the natural enemy of mass adoption.
But that, perhaps, is part of the point. The umlaut is the country quietly insisting that you slow down for a moment and pronounce its name properly. The dots are not decoration. They are an instruction.
What’s in a name
Most renamings in history have been about something other than the name itself. Persia did not become Iran because Iranians had grown tired of the syllables. Siam did not become Thailand for euphony. The renaming is the visible part of a deeper shift — in identity, in self-image, in the story a country wants to tell about itself.
Türkiye is no different. The bird is real. The pronunciation is real. The umlaut is real. But the actual subject of the rebrand is the country’s quiet insistence that, after a hundred years of letting the rest of the world call it whatever it found convenient, it would now like to be addressed by its actual name. In its actual language. With the actual dots.
It is a small request. It is, on balance, a fair one.
Hello, Türkiye.
