Turkey (Türkiye) in other languages: Ankara, Istanbul and 81 provinces

Türkiye, Turkey, Turquie, Turcja: one name, many endings

Almost every language builds the name on the ethnonym Türk and adds its own word or suffix for a country. Turkish itself adds -iye, German -ei in Türkei, Hungarian the word ország in Törökország, and Icelandic and Faroese say land in Tyrkland and Turkaland. English Turkey comes from Medieval Latin Turchia, the form Italian still writes as Turchia and Romanian as Turcia.

Few languages break the pattern. Vietnamese writes Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ, Chinese 土耳其 (Tǔ'ěrqí) and Japanese トルコ (Toruko), three forms that share little with the European ones. Swahili has Uturuki and Ganda Buturuki; Hausa lists Santambul, a form of the city name Istanbul, beside Turkiya, and the Caucasus Kurdish row adds a third form, Р’ом (Ṟom).

In 2022 the state asked the United Nations and other international bodies to use Türkiye in English, after a presidential circular of December 2021 had made it the preferred form for exports and official use. ISO 3166-1 followed and now lists Türkiye as the short name, with Turkey as the previous name. The table above keeps the forms languages use in general writing; several of them changed in official usage after 2022.

Constantinople, Istanbul, Tsargrad: names for one city

Istanbul has more names in this list than any other place in the country. Greek has the full Κωνσταντινούπολη (Kōnstantinoýpolī) and the short Πόλη (Pólī); Ottoman Turkish used both قسطنطینیه (Qosṭanṭīnīyê) and استانبول (Istānbūl). For Constantinople, Serbian lists Цариград (Carigrad) and Icelandic Mikligarður.

Persian alone lists four spellings, from استامبول (Estâmbul) to اسلامبول (Eslâmbul). Ankara, by comparison, is the same word nearly everywhere; only Latin Ancyra and Greek Άγκυρα (Ágkyra) write a different form.

From 67 to 81 provinces: what the numbers say

The codes 01 to 67 follow the alphabetical order of the provinces as they stood in the mid-1980s. Three of them are out of place, because they were assigned under older names: Mersin is 33 as İçel, Kahramanmaraş 46 as Maraş and Şanlıurfa 63 as Urfa. Fourteen provinces were created after that, from Aksaray and Bayburt (68 and 69) in 1989 to Düzce (81) in 1999, and each received the next free number.

Three provinces are named differently from their capital. Hatay is governed from Antakya, Kocaeli from İzmit and Sakarya from Adapazarı. In all other provinces the capital and the province share the name, and İl, province, follows it in the official form: Adana İli, the province of Adana.