State Department to Spell Turkiye ‘Turkiye’
The US Government has reluctantly decided to spell an ally's name they way they prefer.
AP (“US changes to Turkey’s preferred spelling at ally’s request“):
The State Department said Thursday it has adopted Turkey’s preferred spelling for the name of the country, Turkiye, acceding to a request from the NATO ally after several months of hesitation.
The department has instructed that new official documents refer to Turkiye instead of Turkey, although the pronunciation will not change, officials said. But neither the State Department website nor the Foreign Affairs Manual, which guides U.S. diplomatic practices, had been revised to reflect the change as of midday Thursday.
“The Turkish embassy requested that the U.S. government use the name “Republic of Turkiye” in communications,” the department said. “We will begin to refer to Turkiye and Republic of Turkiye accordingly in most formal, diplomatic, and bilateral contexts, including in public communications.”
The move comes ahead of an expected visit to Washington later this month by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu during which Turkey’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its resistance to allowing Finland and Sweden to join NATO will be high on the agenda.
Several other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, had already adopted the new spelling, which had led to inconsistencies in documents across the U.S. government.
Erdogan’s Turkey has been a poor ally for well over a decade, opposing US and NATO policy goals and engaged in democratic backsliding. Their obstruction on the no-brainer admission of Finland and Sweden to the alliance is only the most recent irritation.
At the end of the day, though, we should of course spell the country the way its leaders want it spelled in official correspondence. The exception proves the rule:
The State Department, however, does not often change its style on the names of foreign countries and, in at least one notable case, has refused to do so for decades.
The U.S. still refuses to refer to Burma as Myanmar although the country’s military rulers formally adopted Myanmar in 1989.
The last two countries that the State Department renamed following requests by their governments were North Macedonia, which changed its name from Macedonia in 2019, and Eswatini, which changed its name from Swaziland a year earlier.
In the case of Burma, refusing to use “Myanmar” was a political statement that the coup of 1989 and the continued interference of the military in the country’s government ever since were illegitimate. Generally speaking though, we call countries what they want to be called.
“North Macedonia” wasn’t the country’s preferred name; it was a compromise to solve a longstanding dispute with Greece over the country’s name in order to get its acquiescence to join NATO.
I must confess that I missed Swaziland’s renaming.
Obviously, it’s a small concession worth making. Even so, it mainly shows what a whiny child Erdogan is.
After all, it’s not like the Swedes or Italians start moaning and bitching when an English-speaking person refers to their countries as “Sweden” instead of “Sverige” or “Italy” instead of “Italia”
Although I must say that it would bring me no small amount of joy if the State Department would start using the name Turkiye – just to piss off Erdogan even further. (The Turkish name for Turkey is, of course, “Türkiye” not “Turkiye.”)
As long as they don’t ask us to use a preferred pronoun.
@drj: I think it’s rather silly but the rationale is that “Turkey” has disparaging connotations in English, especially in the United States. And we did accede to, for example, Ivory Coast’s recommendation to be called “Côte d’Ivoire” in official communications.
@James Joyner:
And yet we don’t do it for so many other nations (and so many of them don’t do it for us).
Germany/Deustchland
Japan/Nippon
China/Zhong Guo (Middle Kingdom)
Croatia/Hrvatska
etc.
@James Joyner:
But doesn’t this change kill the link between US Thanksgiving and Anatolia for good? 😀
@Mu Yixiao: Presumably, that’s just because they haven’t made a deal of it. The Germans call France Frankreich, for example, so they’re perfectly comfortable with the ideas that places have other names in foreign languages.
I really enjoyed the Clinton Administration’s spokesman calling it Fyrom, and then explaining that it was shorthand for Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and not an official name.
@Kathy: Perhaps there was a similar request from the poultry industry to call the country by another name. Finally, Armenian-Americans will be able to enjoy Thanksgiving without being reminded of the Armenian Genocide.
Update:
State Department to officially spell “Kevin McCarthy” as “Turkey”.
🙂
@Gustopher: The work by the Ottoman “three” pashas triumverate dictatorship that brought the Ottomans into WWI for the Germans (most ironically none of whom were ethnic turks) at the collapsing end of the Ottoman empire, heavily executed by Kurdish traditional milllet militias. Not terribly Turkish, rather terribly the throws of the nasty disease of romantic ethnic nationalism and romantic ethnic nationalist tropes that eventually lead to the totalitarian horrors of WWII.
But of course in America your sense of history is rather impoverished.
@Lounsbury:
I thought Ahmed Djemal counted as Turkish ethnically, even if born on a “Greek” island?
Anyway: Lets hear it for the Young Turks!
Joking aside, it’s as sad in the way it turned out as so many other dreams of 19th century Europe turned to wormwood and ashes.
Hungarian nationalism, Pan-slavism, Yugoslavism, Germanic nationalism…
In some way the old empires were less harsh than the new ethnic or ideological states.
OTOH both the Ottomans and the Tsars could be utter shits.