Turkey will now be known as ‘Turkiye’. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently released a statement and announced tweaking the country’s internationally recognised name to Turkiye.
Reportedly,the Turkish President announced the name change in early December. This decision will mainly impact how public and foreign nations address the country,
As per the statement, the term ‘Turkiye’ represents and expresses the culture, civilization and values of the Turkish nation in the best way.
As per the reports, the country is called Turkiye in Turkish language, and the country now wants to carry the said name over to international recognition.
Reports have it that in the context of strengthening the ‘Turkiye’ brand, all types of correspondence and activities, especially in official relations with other international institutions, organisations, and countries, will now use the term ‘Turkiye’ instead of ‘Turkey’, ‘Turkei’, ‘Turquie’ and so on.
Referring to this, the Turkish President stated that Turkiye is accepted as an umbrella brand for the country in national and international venues, further adding that Turkiye is the best representation and expression of the Turkish people’s culture, civilization and values.
So going forward, ‘Made in Turkiye’ will now appear on all of the country’s exports, whereas the country’s tourism website, GoTurkiye.com, has also undergone the rebranding.
Why does Turkey want other countries to start spelling its name ‘Türkiye’?
Is Turkey’s recent spelling change about being more authentically Turkish? Or is there more to the story?
In June 2022, the United Nations agreed to change the spelling of the country known in the English-speaking world as Turkey to Türkiye, heeding a request by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In January 2023, the U.S. State Department also agreed to adopt the requested change in its written communications.
A number of news outlets have reported that Turkey has changed its name, but that’s not really true – Turks have called their country Türkiye since 1923, when Turkey became the successor state to the Ottoman Empire. The change is less like Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe in 1980 and more akin to what would happen if the country known in English as Germany asked that the world refer to it as Deutschland, which is the way the Germans say it.
But Erdogan’s request – and the U.N.’s decision to follow suit – does raise the question of why countries seek to change their names.
