If you are involved in the poultry industry, odds are you have done a search on the Internet for turkey, intending to find something pertinent to the bird or the meat it produces, only to have a bunch of page suggestions pop up with information about Turkey, the country.
Then you try to clarify. You type in turkey meat, turkey feed, turkey producers or turkey farm, and you still get a few suggestions regarding the nation.
I know it’s happened to me. But there have probably been many instances where the reverse happened.
That could change, at least eventually.
The United Nations (UN) announced that it officially changed the country’s name to Türkiye, per the request of the Turkish government. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric, in a press release, said that a letter had been received on June 1 from the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu addressed to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, requesting the use of “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey” for all affairs.
Dujarric said the country name change became effective from the moment the letter was received.
For those who live there, it won’t be much of a change. A report by NPR stated that the nation had always been spelled Türkiye for the Turkish. The report noted that the government there hopes the new name – or rebranding, if you will – can boost its image and its struggling tourism industry. Officials there also hope it can also hopefully eliminate some confusion and disassociate the country with the poultry, and the derogatory use of the word unrelated to both the country and the bird.
How long it will take for the world to embrace the change remains unseen. After all, I still refer to Pibb Xtra as Mr. Pibb, and the rebranding of that soda took place more than 20 years ago. There are countless other examples.
But I do hope with the name change, confusion over turkey and Türkiye is minimized.
