\n<\/p>\n
Is Turkey\u2019s recent spelling change about being more authentically Turkish? Or is there more to the story?<\/p>\n
In June 2022, the United Nations agreed to change<\/a> the spelling of the country known in the English-speaking world as Turkey to T\u00fcrkiye, 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>.<\/p>\n A number of news outlets have reported<\/a> that Turkey has changed its name, but that\u2019s not really true \u2013 Turks have called their country T\u00fcrkiye since 1923<\/a>, when Turkey became the successor state to the Ottoman Empire. The change is less like Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe in 1980<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n But Erdogan\u2019s request \u2013 and the U.N.\u2019s decision to follow suit \u2013 does raise the question of why countries seek to change their names.<\/p>\n