Revisiting Turkey vs. Türkiye

How has Turkey's name policy held up over the years?

Hi folks,

I took the week off for the Bayram/Eid al-Adha holiday. Since I’ve been back, I’ve opened up a new thread in the chat session for Kültürkampf. If you’re looking for a place to talk about the issues I write about here (and some that I don’t), feel free to drop by!

To ease into the post-Bayram period, I’d like to return to one of the first posts on this blog that went viral, and that was my take on Turkey’s name-change policy.

Turkey vs. Türkiye

Let’s briefly recall what happened. The Erdoğan palace decided that they were changing the country’s name in all foreign languages to “Türkiye.” They presented this as a normal name change policy, like Holland switching to “Netherlands,” or Macedonia becoming “North Macedonia.”

I didn’t think so. I thought it was a bizarre policy that exposed some of the narcissism inherent in Turkey’s new regime.

You see, places don’t just have one name, they have endonyms and exonyms. An endonym is a name for a place in its native language. An exonym is a name for a place in foreign languages. So if you’re German, you’re calling your country “Deutschland.” If you’re French, you’re going to call your neighboring country “Allemagne.” If you’re Turkish you’ll call the country “Almanya,” and if you’re Japanese you’ll call it ドイツ [Doitsu].

There’s usually one or two “endonyms” for a country, but there are many hundreds of exonyms, because there’s many hundreds of languages out in the world.

Erdoğan and his people were evidently bothered by Turkey’s exonym in English. They felt that sharing a name with a strange, flightless bird undermined the country’s gravitas.

I think that’s silly, but it’s not why I objected to their policy.

What they might have done in this case is to change Turkey’s exonym in English only. They didn’t do this. I think they were too ashamed about being ashamed about the comparison to turkeys. They couldn’t help being petty, but didn’t want to seem petty, so they did something sweeping to cover it up: they abolished Turkey’s exonyms altogether. Or they proposed to, anyway. They asked the entire world to stop using their language’s exonyms and say “Türkiye,” the contemporary endonym for Turkey.

Now the Erdoğan regime isn’t exactly known for its elegance in policy-making, but I thought that this was a uniquely ugly policy, even by their standards. It was likely thought up by Fahrettin Altun, the chauvinistic President of the “Directorate of Communications,” a sprawling extension of the presidential palace.

In addition to being extremely narcissistic, the policy was also impractical. Other languages have different names for your country for a reason. The exonym presumably reflects that group’s experience with your country, and it’s usually easy to pronounce for the group of people who use it. English-speakers can say “Turkey” but they will inevitably butcher “Türkiye” (arguably landing on a slightly different exonym).

Turkey vs. Türkiye Today

Since it has now been a couple of years since Ankara implemented its policy, I thought it’s time to check back in with it. Did it work? Have people been adopting it? Does it boost their respect for the country?

Let’s take a look at the UEFA cup games.

I checked some English-language footage for the Portugal-Turkey game (3:0, ouch) and saw a clean win for “Turkey.” I think in some places where they have to list the “official” name of the country, they used “Türkiye,” but everywhere else, including in-game commentary, everyone was saying “Turkey.”

It’s officially “Türkiye” but the commentators mostly said “Turkey”

Looking at English-language news outlets, there’s a clear Türkiye-Turkey line. Pro-regime outlets like TRT, AA, as well as outlets from revisionist countries like China Daily or Sputnik use “Türkiye.” Everyone else who publishes in English uses “Turkey.” That includes relatively pro-Erdoğan outlets like Middle East Eye or Al Jazeera.

All the non-English language outlets I checked also continue to use their own exonyms for Turkey. Websites like Google and Wikipedia still use “Turkey.”

So far, I’d say this policy has failed. “Turkey” 1 : “Türkiye” 0.

Every once in a while I’ll notice someone in the diaspora, like this writer on Time Out London, picking up on “Türkiye.” That feels like diaspora enthusiasm to me. It’s one more thing that the person can do to signal belonging to the country of her origin.

For regular people who very rarely deal with Turkey, the name change can be confusing. Some months ago, I was texting with a friend in the US, and noticed that she was using “Türkiye.” I usually don’t comment on it, but I got curious and asked her how she came to pick up the new term. She said she had been dealing with Turkish institutions after the earthquake in February last year, and being a sensitive person, wanted to be sure about her usage. “Not knowing the implications, I usually default to the name for the country, place, people etc that those people decide” she said, “99% of the time that just involves trying not to use imperialist language.”

I thought that was very decent of her. The problem was that in this case, the old usage wasn’t imperialist language. Upon some discussion (and a link to my above piece), my friend mused that “usage could end up being some de facto shibboleth for conformity with the ruling powers,” which didn’t seem to sit well with her.

I have smart friends.

I’d like to hear from you though. Do you have any thoughts on the policy? Have you struggled with it one way or the other?

Let me know in the comments, the chat session or simply reply to this email.