Türkiye or Turkey?

34 comments

1. I don’t know anything about this, and I also never talk about Turkey. Also don’t know how to make that letter on my keyboard.

2. If I had to work for the US government or an NGO and had to write about Turkey in some sort of formal capacity I would call it Turkiye. Otherwise too bad.

3. Probably just going to use Turkey due to laziness and autocorrect.

4. I will not be making any changes to my current status of never referring to this nation.

5. I’m calling it Turkey until they beg forgiveness for buying the S-400.

6. I don’t know how to do the two dots, so Turkiye.

7. > Do you refer to the Republic of Turkey with the name “Türkiye?”

   No, not until every person in that country spells and pronounces “The United States of America” just as we do. /s

   Seriously, every country pronounces every other country in their own manner, consistent with the language they themselves use, not what the subject country uses. This seems quite unnecessary.

8. I ain’t gettin’ all fancy and slingin’ umlauts for Turkey, dawg.

9. Turkey until Erdogan stops kissing up to Putin.

10. I call it the former Ottoman Empire.

11. I’ve gone for chaotic neutral, where I do call Turkey Türkiye but switched back to calling Istanbul Constantinople. Can’t let anyone have nothing for free.

12. I am used to calling it Turkey, so that is what I prefer. That is, unless someone tells me they prefer to see it written as Türkiye.

13. I’m not sure how Turkey/Türkiye is getting this treatment when there’s a country called Sakartvelo yet for some reason, the West is just like “nah, we’re going to say Georgia for that instead”

14. The State Department’s .gov still refers to the country as Turkey as of your post. I saw a news article reporting on this name change in January, but evidently it hasn’t spread far. Maybe because it’s an asinine resolution

15. If it gets popular, I’ll start spelling it Turkiye, but I’m writing for an English speaking audience who are familiar with using Turkey. So Turkey is what I’ll use unless and until the alternate spelling gets popular enough to have equal recognition.

    I won’t start using the umlaut because my keyboard doesn’t make it easy, and again, *English speaking audience.*. The percentage of readers who’d know what to do with the dots is trivial and doesn’t even include me.

16. It’s one of those things that’s you’ll probably need to get the next generation used to. Like switching from The Ukraine to Ukraine, or Peking to Beijing, etc. I’m already pretty programmed to the English spelling of it.

    I think it’s weird trying to force countries to pronounce other countries names using their language rules.

    Will Turkish officials call China “ZhongGuo” using the right tones and all?

17. Not sure. On the one hand, what they refer to themselves as in their own language doesn’t inherently affect *our* language. We don’t call Spain “España” or Germany “Deutschland.” In English they’re “Turkey,” and that doesn’t necessarily change because they changed the name of the country in Turkish.

    But on the other hand, I do have a preference for calling people what they want to be called, whether it’s individuals, a group, etc. If they don’t like sharing their name with a bird (which apparently *is* at least in part the reason they’re changing their name), that’s as decent a reason as any to try to change it.

    I guess where I stand is that I’m not *opposed* to calling them “Turkiye,” but I’m probably not ever going to remember to do so and won’t feel terribly bad about it. If the international community generally adopts moving from “Turkey” to “Turkiye,” I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to doing so.

    EDIT: Thinking about this a little more, I think I’d be less ambivalent to this if it wasn’t being driven by Erdogan, who’s an authoritarian asshole who makes me want to do whatever the *opposite* is of what he wants.

18. I don’t call Japan by it’s native name so why should I call Turkey by it?

19. I’m gonna keep calling it Turkey because it’s easier than finding an umlaut on my keyboard.

20. I will keep calling it Turkey in my personal life. I have no idea how to pronounce Türkiye. I also don’t call Germany Deutschland, Italy Italia, or Spain España.

21. We need to re-normalize Anglicization of loan words. I won’t be breaking out the umlauts for Turkey, before you know it I’ll be asked to install a Hangul keyboard on my phone.

22. How is Turkiye pronounced? I see it as Turk-eye-yee.

23. If we can call Deutschland “Germany,” Turkey should be acceptable.

24. I do say Turkey, sometimes I think my Turkish friend judges me for it 😂 maybe I’ll switch over after this post!

25. Always gonna be called Turkey by me especially since it has such a fowl leader.

26. It’ll always be Phrygia to me.

27. That’s what they wanna be called, then that’s what they’re gonna be called.

    Then again I still call Hard Rock Stadium Joe Robbie Stadium, because it is.

28. We don’t use umlauts so, at best it will be Turkiye for me. But really, it will be a hard habit to break for the few times I have ever written that out and not meant the bird.

29. I personally think it would be better if everyone just called every country by the name the country called itself (don’t downvote me, I’m not advocating for it). So I would call it Türkiye if anyone knew what I was talking about. But I would also call Germany Deutschland if it was reasonable to do that in English.

30. I have a friend who recently adopted a new name and a new gender presentation. If that’s what they want, I have no objection, as long as they understand I’m going to occasionally slip up and use the old name for a while until I get used to it

    That’s how I feel about Türkiye.

31. I still say Turkey. My boyfriend’s family is Turkish, and his grandpa (immigrated from Turkey) had no clue that governments were officially using Türkiye. He got annoyed when we told him, and ranted a bit about Americans not having the proper alphabet to write it and not knowing how different accent marks sound. Told us to keep using Turkey, lmfao

32. Turkey.

    I don’t tell them how they refer to America or spell “America” in their own language. And I don’t personally care either. I don’t call Spain “España”. The whole thing seems ridiculous.

33. I don’t think the Turkish dictator has a right to demand we change the way our language sounds.

34. The problem with this is that English doesn’t use accents in vowels, except for the occasional French e as in café, and even that is optional. So it makes it seem more “foreign-looking,” but doesn’t actually *inform* us. Similarly, the sound at the end of the country is just not how the cadence in English works. We tend to end words with a hard stop or a notably open vowel and not have this breathy Turk-**EE**-^yah thing going on. So “kiye” as a spelling is rather confusing to pronounce in English, and the people who would pronounce it “authentically” would likely be seen as a bit pretentious, like someone over-doing their correct pronunciation of French or Spanish words. So the end result is that we would probably say it the same way but just be far more confused by the spelling. Or butcher the pronunciation in a different way. “It says here you’re from… Tor-Kai-yee?”