Erdogan changed it because he is a nationalist and took offense to the name of his country being compared to the bird. So now the country is on a PR campaign to get the international community on board with Türkiye, which is supposedly a more accurate phonetic rendering of the country’s name (if your language has the same phonetics as Turkish).

Personally, while I do think it’s a bit silly for countries to try to mandate what they are called in other languages (e.g. you don’t see Germany getting upset that not a single one of their neighbors save Austria calls them “Deutschland”), I know Turkey is not the first to do so and I generally respect attempts to “reclaim” identities (such as changing Kiev to Kyiv for Ukraine). But I think the umlaut is where I draw the line.

When I heard them announce Turkey during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, it sounded more like “Turkia” to me, so I don’t know why we don’t just use that, since my mind keeps reading Türkiye as “Toork-yay”.

Plus when I type Türkiye, my phone’s keyboard still auto-suggests the 🦃 emoji anyways so I’d say it was a lost battle from the start.