Renaming a Nation Is Harder Than It Looks, as Nauru's UN Bid Shows

When Nauru asks the United Nations this week to call it Naoero, it will join a long line of countries that have tried to change what the world calls them — and discovered that a name is rarely just a name.

Five years ago, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, launched his own campaign against a word he said had become tangled up with an American bird. Search for the country online, state media complained, and results conflate it with Meleagris — the turkey — a creature famous for Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving tables, and a term dictionaries also define as something that fails badly. The government asked the world's roughly 1.5 billion English speakers to drop a word associated with defeat and stuffing.

Erdogan had argued since 2012 that Türkiye, the name used in Turkish for a century, suited the nation better. By then he had become the country's most influential leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and under his two-decade rule the nation took on a more conservative character. He directed that values drawn from the Turkish nation's deep-rooted history be treated with the utmost care. Some observers saw a narrower motive: Ali Fuad Selvi, an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, wrote that the change carried an ultimate motivation to consolidate Erdogan's political power and authority and elevate his status as a national leader.

Turkey notified the United Nations in June 2022, and the organisation complied immediately, as did NATO, which Turkey joined in 1952. A UN spokesman said the change took effect the moment the secretary-general received a letter requesting Türkiye in all matters. Many governments and NGOs now use it, and the United States mostly does. Yet many media organisations and ordinary people still say Turkey, and at least one British government warning still advises against all travel to parts of Turkey.

Corporate rebrands fail all the time — think New Coke, or Netflix's short-lived Quikster — but renaming a country often touches independence movements, armed conflicts, ethnic divisions and disputes over the meaning of history itself.

Siam became Thailand in 1939 to foster ethnic unity and shed a foreign label, and the change stuck almost everywhere English is spoken. Swaziland became the Kingdom of Eswatini in April 2018, a relatively simple switch that largely took root within a few years.

Other cases show how subtle the politics of naming can be. The Portuguese name Costa do Marfim appeared on 17th-century nautical charts because ivory dominated that stretch of the West African coast. France ruled the territory from 1893 until 1960, and it kept its colonial name after independence — unlike many African nations — because its first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, favoured cooperation with France over a sharp rupture. Linguists note that picking a name from one of the country's 60-odd languages could have seemed to favour one community, while the French name was an accepted national label. In 1985 the country asked the UN to use only its French name and stop translating it as Ivory Coast or Costa de Marfil. The request, framed as ending the treatment of the name as a geographical term, never became universal, perhaps because it hinged on such linguistic nuance.

Cabo Verde took a similar path. Independent since 1975, the Portuguese-speaking archipelago asked the UN in 2013 to stop translating its name as Cape Verde in English or Cap-Vert in French and to use Cabo Verde in every language. The government of then prime minister José Maria Neves said it needed to reinforce the country's identity, standardise its designation in international organisations and consolidate the Cabo Verde brand in diplomacy, tourism, the economy and culture. It has kept marketing that brand around the islands' music, democratic stability and morabeza, a Creole term associated with hospitality. The 2026 World Cup gave it the widest platform yet: FIFA consistently called the team Cabo Verde as the tournament debutants held future champions Spain to a scoreless draw and reached the knockout stage before a vast global audience.

On a planet where nearly a fifth of people speak English — a language that reaches the farthest corners through film, television and music — reasserting native tongues can be a heavy lift. Siam became Thailand decades ago, and today an English speaker craving phad kaphrao simply looks for a Thai restaurant; only cat lovers still seek the silky Siamese.

Not every rename is driven from within. President Donald Trump's executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario have been criticised as merely demagogic impulsivity, and Erdogan's critics at home have likewise seen autocratic tendencies in his push for Türkiye. For Nauru, as for the others, the question is whether the world will follow.