Given my severe phobia of birds, and farm birds in particular, I am the last person who should be writing about turkeys. But hey ho, cometh the hour and all that.
This week, whilst typing on WhatsApp Web on my laptop, rattling off what I though was a mildly amusing joke about Jamie Oliver’s war on turkey twizzlers some years ago, I found myself censored — yes, dear reader, censored I tell you. Before my very eyes, the word “turkey” was rendered “Türkiye”. I hadn’t even written it with a capital letter; I was mid-sentence. Cue some furious backspacing and de-umlautification.
Some informal experimentation since the incident has shown mixed results. It occurs on WhatsApp Web on my laptop, but not on WhatsApp on my iPhone. Yet it doesn’t seem to be down to my laptop OS, since it doesn’t make similar corrections elsewhere. So, I will pin the blame on WhatsApp, and its owner, Meta.
The policing of my apparent anti-Ottoman slur was a small shock, but not a surprise. This petty control of language, even of spelling, has become commonplace in recent years. We are all familiar with it when it comes to gender identities and pronouns, as well as with ethnicity (“Black”, capitalised, is now the accepted spelling).
Now countries and cities are getting in on the act. It seemed to go into turbocharge after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There was an observable shift within just a few days of war breaking out as Anglophone broadcasters began referring to “Kiev” as “Kyiv”, as if this supposed act of solidarity was an incantation that might cast a protective spell around the Ukrainian capital. To stick to the spelling and pronunciation familiar to all Englishmen apparently marked one out as a useful idiot and a Russian stooge. Schoolchildren tell me that, if you say “Kiev!” three times in the mirror into the school toilets, Vladimir Putin will appear.
The rise of “Kyiv” was particularly intense, given that it signalled one’s commitment to a cause which, regardless of its merits, had become an opportunity for virtue signalling. But it set a new fashionable precedent that is snowballing, like Georgian fops wearing increasingly gargantuan wigs. Now, Turkey has fallen, with even the BBC defaulting to the vogue spelling, falling in line with Turkey’s 2022 request for such deference. Similar shenanigans are afoot with the Czech Republic (“Czechia”) and Calcutta (“Kolkata”). “Turkey” even gets a jagged red line under it on X, of all places. If Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are all in on the vibe-shift, someone needs to tell them that their platforms are still busy policing microaggressive spelling.
Of course, if countries rename themselves wholesale, it is sensible for other countries to refer to them accordingly, as we do with, say, Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). You may have missed it, but Swaziland is now Eswatini—fair enough. Conceding to demands about transliterated spelling in our own language, however, is a step too far. It’s a concession we only make out of our unique sense of postcolonial self-loathing (bizarrely, in this instance, to the Turks, whose empire lasted a good deal longer than ours).
If you adopt these new monikers needlessly, however, you do not look cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Rather, you come across as if you’ve just returned from your gap yah in Gambia (sorry, The Gambia) or, as if you’re a middle-aged football commentator who has suddenly taken it into his head to attempt an authentic guttural pronunciation of a foreign surname. Steve McLaren speaking English with a Dutch accent comes to mind.
More seriously, these impositions are yet another example of forced attempts to manage the tensions of multiculturalism by inserting obviously incongruous diversity into our media without comment, and trusting that the levee of British politeness will hold and not draw attention to it. The countryside is racist, and so is quietly adorned with signage featuring women in burkas as if their presence were as commonplace and historic as an English oak. Transphobia is the human rights issue of our time, and so a headline about the emergency alert system must feature a Progress Pride flag as if the world and his polycule go round casually with this as their phone background.
Returning to football: did you know that the Premier League now produces videos on how to pronounce players’ surnames at the start of the season? It is presented as a fun, helpful tool, but the suggestion is that pie-and-chip munching away fans need to get with the programme. The entire nation has become the teacher presented with a difficult name on the register at the start of the school year, petrified of being labelled as a racist because you can’t pronounce sounds hitherto unknown to your mother tongue. And yet, only a decade or so ago, an elaborately named player like former Chelsea defender Cesar Azpilicueta could just be affectionately christened “Dave” by the fans.
If you notice any of this, if you mispronounce a name, or if you fail to observe the quietly revised spelling of anointed words, even in the sanctum sanctorum of your own mind, you are exposed to both the world and yourself as Entirely The Wrong Sort. You are not Respectable. You have missed the latest episode of The News Agents. Gary Lineker is very disappointed in you. The interference of WhatsApp is particularly egregious because it intrudes upon my private communications. It is a Foucaldian policing of private desire, a life submitted to the progressive digital panopticon. It is multiculturalism working as intended.
Is this kind of Newspeak an engrained feature now? Time will tell. It would all be easy enough to change with some political will and editorial backbone. Or the winds of fashion may blow themselves out. But until then, we may have to endure being force fed a few more Türkiye Kyivs.
