Reasons for name change:

• Domestically, citizens refer to the land as Turkiye, but its anglicised version ‘Turkey’ was adopted internationally following the country’s independence in 1923.
• Apparently, the country’s government was not pleased with the Google search results that came up for the word ‘Turkey’. Some of these results included the large bird that is served for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals in North America.
• The government has also had objections to Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of the term “turkey”; “something that fails badly” or “a stupid or silly person”.

Have other countries changed their names?

• There are other countries that have changed their names either to drop colonial legacies or rebrand, as is the case with Turkey. Some examples include
  • The Netherlands, which was changed from Holland;
  • Macedonia, which changed its name to North Macedonia due to political disputes with Greece;
  • Iran, which changed its name from Persia in 1935;
  • Siam, which changed its name to Thailand; and
  • Rhodesia, which changed to Zimbabwe to drop its colonial legacy.