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.
