The United States plays its third game at the World Cup on Thursday night in Los Angeles. Its opponent is familiar, but it will be playing under a name that is not.
In some places, including much of the Western news media, the opposing team will be listed under the well-known name “Turkey.” But some organizations, including FIFA, the tournament organizer, and Fox Sports, an official broadcaster of the games, are using “Türkiye,” pronounced tur-KEE-yeh.
What’s going on here?
Turkey
The modern Turkish state was founded in 1923, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In the English-speaking world, it has generally been known by its Anglicized name, Turkey.
The New York Times, for example, used “Turkey” when the nation was born and when it joined NATO nearly 30 years later. It still uses that name today.
Other languages have their own names for the country, of course. In French, Turquie; in German, Türkei; in Spanish, Turquía; and in Hungarian, Törökország.
The push to rebrand the country started in the last decade and was inspired by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
“One of the central narratives the AKP government has built is that a more confident, stable, powerful and internationally visible ‘new Turkey’ has emerged in place of the ‘old Turkey,’” said Doğuş Düzgün, a researcher in political toponymy, the study of names, at Eskişehir Osmangazi University in Turkey. He added that the country was eager to establish its independence from the West on the global stage, and that the name change was “a symbolic piece of that broader claim to agency and visibility.”
The move did not necessarily come from a popular groundswell.
“Some groups welcomed the decision, while others questioned its necessity or sincerity,” Mr. Düzgün said. “It wasn’t something that had built into a broad social movement over the years.”
An international public relations campaign also coincided with the push for a name change.
Which brings us to the word for Turkey in Turkish …
Türkiye
Much as Germany is Deutschland to a German and Spain is España to a native, Turkish people call their country Türkiye. Campaigns to promote Deutschland or España don’t seem to be on the horizon. But since Mr. Erdogan’s push, Türkiye is starting to be used more outside Turkey as well.
The United Nations officially changed the name in 2022, and the State Department began using it in 2023, though as of now both spellings appear on its website: “Turkey (Türkiye).”
But for those who don’t attend U.N. sessions or read State Department documents regularly, the World Cup may have been their first exposure to the name. Television announcers use the three-syllable name during matches.
Other World Cup teams have dual identities. FIFA lists the Czech team as Czechia, a name the nation has promoted for about a decade, although many still call it the Czech Republic. FIFA also uses the Portuguese name Cabo Verde, though most English-speaking sources stick with Cape Verde for the West African island nation. Same for Côte d’Ivoire, known often in English as Ivory Coast.
Turkey, lowercase ‘T’
A less often stated reason for Turkey’s name change is the matter of a certain galliform native to the Western Hemisphere: the turkey.
To be clear, “Turkey” came first. It was a name commonly used to refer to the Ottoman Empire for centuries and existed in variations as far back as Ancient Greece.
Then the word began to be applied to birds imported from Africa through Turkish territory, and then to the familiar bird native to the new world, the Oxford English Dictionary says.
And not every Turkish person likes the association. After all, the turkey is not the most dignified bird in the aviary. And calling someone a “turkey” is far less friendly than calling them, say, a “lion.”
A 2025 study of the Turkish rebranding by Ali Fuad Selvi in the journal Names cited one motivation for the change as “deeply rooted etymological irritation stemming from the misinterpreted linkage between the turkey (the animal) and Turkey (the country) which have led to taunts and mockery.”
Dr. Selvi’s paper also noted “the connotational nuances arising from turkey-related puns.”
The Turkish people may just want to once and for all retire old nursery-school gags in English like “Hungary ate Turkey in Greece on China.”
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