Baby boy Abdurrahman

How fancy Turks choose names for their kids, and what it means for the culture war

There is a slightly creepy practice in Turkey: when a baby is born, people like to keep the umbilical cord and bury it in a schoolyard, or more often these days, on a university campus. The idea is that the child may grow up to study and become a professional.

Among the (upper) middle classes, the practice has grown in scale and scope, and the umbilical cord is often given to a relative or friend who lives in a Western country, who takes it back to said country and buries it on the campus of a prestigious university there.

My sister went to Northwestern, and she buried an umbilical cord in the frozen soil of Evanston, IL. If you dug around Harvard Yard or University Parks at Oxford, you might just come across the DNA of some rich kid in Istanbul who’s playing PlayStation ten hours a day.

The other thing new parents do to propel their offspring to the ranks of the Western elite is to give him or her the right kind of name — one that’ll allow the kid to blend in at a Western institution. I think a lot of people have the mental image of some tweed-wearing professor taking roll call at neoclassical lecture hall, going:

Victoria - here!

Steven - here!

Christopher - here!

uhh… ka…gla?…

Çağla¹ raises her hand, cursing her parents’ under her breath - here.

I don’t know why upwardly mobile new Turkish parents are haunted by that image, but trust me, they are. People call me about this stuff. Sometimes they have a name in mind and ask me how people in the West would read it and pronounce it. Sometimes they’re drawing blanks and ask for any names I might have come across.

A very basic criterion in the selection process is to avoid names with Turkish letters (ş, ç, ğ, ı). Another is to avoid anything too overtly Islamic. “Ahmet” and “Ayşe” are going to be rare in these circles. Instead, there’s lots of elemental names like “Deniz” (sea/ocean), “Kaya” (rock), “Bulut” (cloud) “Toprak” (soil), “Doğa” (nature). These are perhaps comparable to native American names, in the sense that they evoke a pre-Islamic, almost shamanic identity.

If you go up further on the income scale, the need for novelty increases, and you’ll encounter people now who’ll name their kids “Lena” or “Mia,” names that aren’t remotely Turkish, but are deemed to sound more Western, but without the stigma of being too obviously Western. It would still be too strange, for example, to come across a Turkish toddler called “Kristofer,” but if you go to rich Istanbul neighborhoods, I’m told that you will find kids named “Luka.” Some of these names are from glitzy TV shows, like “Mira” from Med Cezir. (On the farthest end of the spectrum, I’ve heard of some names like “Kandide” or “Milav,” made up to sound like the English words “candid” and “my love.”)

I think of these people as the Instagram set. They often enjoy generational wealth, the kinds of people who have their weddings in Italy and put on a slight English accent when they speak Turkish. They’re not in favor of the Erdoğan regime, nor are they seriously opposed to it. They might think the AK Party nouveau riche uncouth, but they’re all too happy to do business with them.

Either way, it’s a very small group, but I’m afraid their tastes do trickle down to other people over time. I fully expect to see a subset of Turkish kids in the next decades to have more of these Western-sounding, monosyllabic, and often androgynous names.

Right: My mother’s name is Dilara, my father’s name is Doğan, and they came up with my name by combining their names. Left: Dildo, you mom’s calling you. (By Yiğit Gözgür)

The people who ask me about baby names are often upwardly mobile professionals. They often have some names in mind and want to know how English speakers would pronounce them. Can they name their kid the sleek-sounding “Can” (think “Jahn”), for example, or would that inevitably be pronounced “can” as in a “can of coke” and thus cause confusion? (Yes, yes it would).

I usually tell people that there is a group of names that actually transition very well between Turkish and Western languages: Biblical names! The Turkish “Musa” becomes “Moses,” “İbrahim” becomes “Abraham,” “Meryem” becomes “Miriam” or just “Mary,” “Havva” becomes “Eve,” “Harun” becomes “Aaron,” “Yusuf” becomes “Joseph.”

The principle extends to many classical Arabic names that have English cognates in wide use. “Ömer” is “Omar,” “Fatma” is “Fatima,” “Ayşe” is “Aisha,” “Hüseyin” is “Hussein.” I have an Egyptian-Turkish friend whose name is “Yasmin” and she can go by “Yasemin” in Turkish, and it works pretty well for her. Names like “Ali” and “Mustafa” are optimal because they’re spelled the same and are common enough to be used across the Western world.

There. Problem solved.

But of course, I’m being a bit facetious when I say these things. I know that the people asking me don’t want to hear these names. They want something “modern,” and these names have a very conservative feel in Turkey. They spend their days beating back the tide of Islamism around them. Many have Islamic names themselves, and feel that it’s pulling them down in international settings. They don’t want to burden their child with that feeling. Given the waves of Islamophobia in the West, that’s not unreasonable. Yes, diversity is valued in some of the elite Western institutions, where Muslim names might even be an advantage sometimes, but those places are very difficult to reach for most people I know.

In Istanbul, if someone named “Abdurrahman bey” has left a message for you, he’s unlikely to be the young consultant at McKinsey’s Istanbul office. (That’s “Cem bey,” or “Emre bey.”) Abdurrahman bey is probably a delivery person, or someone working for Çalık Holding, which is tightly integrated into the Erdoğan regime.

The “West” in Turkey and the West in actual Western countries are very different cultural environments. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that Turkish Westernness aspires to be non-Abrahamic, while liberal Westernness is post-Abrahamic. In Western countries, and especially the United States, branches of Christianity and Judaism have offloaded some of the heaviest practices of their traditions and developed “reformed” versions. Names like “Joseph” or “Rebecca” don’t necessarily hint at an orthodox religious upbringing. Educated people might still understand some Biblical references, even if they don’t adhere to orthodox religious practices. Being Catholic or Jewish might have a texture that younger people want to pass on to the next generation.

One person who has called for similar movements in Islam has been Mustafa Akyol. In his book The Islamic Moses, he argues that Islam and Judaism actually have a longer-running relationship than Christianity and Judaism. This amounts to a counter to the notion that the “Judeo-Christian” West and an “Islamic World” are ontologically distinct, and ought to be separate political, or perhaps we should say, “civilizational” spheres. I don’t share Akyol’s belief in a liberal Islam, but I do agree on that basic point. There isn’t anything about Islamic doctrine or culture that’s any less “Western” than there is in Christianity and Judaism.

Still, there isn’t a post-Islamic middle-class culture in Turkey. We could talk about why that is, but the bottom line is that there just isn’t. Hence the turn away from Abrahamic names, and the search for new ones.

Note of course, that I’m only talking about a very small group of Turkish people here. The vast majority of people in Turkey have very different concerns when they pick names for their kids. Among the population as a whole, warlike Turkic names like “Alparslan” and “Ertuğrul” are popular for boys, while girls are given pious names like “Zeynep” and “Elif.” I can’t cover all that here though, but perhaps that’s material for a future post.²

1. OK, so this sounds CHA-la, where:

- "CHA" rhymes with "cha" in "charm," and

- "la" is like the "la" in "lava."

Here’s how ChatGPT breaks it down according to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Yeah, you’re all welcome:

[ˈt͡ʃɑːɫɑ]

Here's a breakdown of the sounds:

• [t͡ʃ]: This represents the "Ç" sound, which is like the "ch" in English "chop."

• [ɑː]: A long "a" sound, as in "father."

• [ɫ]: This is a "dark L," often used in Turkish, where the "L" is pronounced with the back of the tongue raised towards the soft palate.

• [ɑ]: A final "a" sound, like the "a" in "father."

The name has different meanings. I think most people choose it because it refers to the sound of flowing fresh water, as in a fast river or a waterfall. The Nişanyan name dictionary says it means “ripe fruit” in Mongolian. Go figure.

2. Addendum: there’s this excellent piece by

Nick Ashdown

in Newlines Magazine entitled What’s in a Turkish Name?