Turkey has told the UN that, at the behest of its president, it wishes from now on to be called “Turkiye” in all languages, the world body announced on Thursday.
“The change is immediate,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said by e-mail.
He added that Ankara’s official letter requesting the change had been received at the UN’s New York headquarters on Wednesday.
The day before, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavasoglu had posted on Twitter a photograph of himself signing the letter, addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“With the letter I sent to the UN Secretary General today, we are registering our country’s name in foreign languages at the UN as ‘Turkiye,’” he wrote, including an umlaut over the letter “u.”
BRAND VALUE
He added that the change would bring to an end the process of “increasing the brand value of our country,” an initiative started by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led the country for almost two decades.
Over the past few years, the country has sought to change the branding on its products from “made in Turkey” to “made in Turkiye.”
In addition to making the UN’s nomenclature match how the nation is spelled in Turkish, the update would also help distinguish the country from the bird of the same name in English.
“The name change may seem silly to some, but it puts Erdogan in the role of protector, of safeguarding international respect for the country,” Georgetown University professor Mustafa Aksakal was quoted as saying in the New York Times.
The newspaper noted that the move comes ahead of next year’s presidential election, as well as the centenary of the nation’s founding after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
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