Have you tried looking at the pronunciation guide in a dictionary?

This will to 'be known as "Türkiye"' is nothing more than the will that English speaking people should stop using "Turkey" and use "Türkiye" instead; but English is not Turkish.

@LPH To be fair, it has become more common these days to adopt a country's preferred naming rather than sticking with Anglicized names. I think the latter is considered a remnant of colonial thinking.

@Barmar I don't think colonialism has much to do with that; nevertheles it is not realistic to introduce in the language foreign spellings and pronunciations from numerous languages. The Turks' problem seems to be solely the negative connotations that are found associated with the word "turkey". I am not even aware of any jokes concerning the Turks that use a play on words of this sort, and personally, I soon dismiss as silly the possible evocation of the bird and the stupid person when I hear the name of the country.

@LPH Maybe it's the wrong word, but there's some kind of arrogance that causes people to make up their own names for other people, instead of just using their names. Like when European continued to call Native Americans "Indians", even though they knew this came from a mistake.

I think in post-colonial times we tend to give more dignity to other societies.

@Barmar I almost agree with that, if not true arrogance maybe a devil-may-care attitude.

@Barmar No doubt, that has been recognized as the only way.

@LPH I associate it with the same Europeans who decided Africans were "savages" and could be taken as slaves. That's arrogance.

@Barmar Difficult to say, there are questions of ancient culture and "ancient psychology" involved, and so you might want to be careful before being too categorical.

@LPH True. The naming thing is just tradition. "We've always called it Germany, we're not going to switch to Deutscheland now."

@Barmar: To be fair, the English-speaking peoples surely have a right to define their own language. Undeniably, the umlaut Ü is not an English letter, so it has no place in our orthography, and almost certainly the way Turks might pronounce it will involve phonemes that don't exist in English. Hence the entire question is Off Topic "Not about English".

@FumbleFingers That seems a bit harsh. In any case, I didn't ask about the spelling, I asked about the pronunciation (in English).

'Türkiye' is reasonably understandable to those countries who use the Latin script. But is it reasonable to expect citizens of such countries to understand 'ราชอาณาจักรไทย' or others whose script isn't known?

@Barmar a country or city's name may not be exactly pronouncable no matter how it is spelled: Peking or Beijing. But you've confused the issue of colonialism: Bombay/Mumbai, Madras/Chennai aren't in the same field. And Europeans weren't the only ones to take slaves, cough cough.

It appears to me that people are voting to close this question because they think the Turkish were unreasonable. That's not the question.

Does it happen to be the same as Turkey? Of course it does. The French capital is Par-is, not Par-ee. Please remember that the bird was named after the country, not the other way round.

@Řídící not me, but the current close reasons aren't due to being "unreasonable".

@WeatherVane Maybe we are getting somewhere. Many English speakers pronounce the name "Côte d'Ivoire" − when they read it − (somewhat) like "Côte d'Ivoire", not like "Ivory Coast". Now what about "Türkiye"?

That's completely irrelevant. I would pronounce it sth like "coat divor".

@WeatherVane It seems more relevant than your Paris analogy.

No, it's a reversal, more like renaming Turkey as Keytur. I don't get your question at all. We call it Turkey, no matter how you like to spell it. If that's not how you say it, please provide a closer English version than Turkey, because we don't speak Turkish.

@WeatherVane You think it is more like a Bombay/Mumbai-thing than an Ivory Coast/Côte d'Ivoire-thing?

No, you've misunderstood my comment, which was directed at Barmar. Let me say it again. We don't know how to pronounce Turkish language, unless you tell us.

@WeatherVane If you don't speak Turkish and also not French (presumably), why would you say "coat divor"? That seems like an attempt at French.

I do speak French, and your example is quite different. It's a translation of 'Ivory Coast' into French (even though it's in Africa), and my rendering was as a supposed British person who does not speak French, although many more of us do, than speak Turkish. In the same way, we pronounce Türkiye as Turkey.

@WeatherVane And presumably "Türkiye" is a translation of "Turkey" into Turkish. So, what's the difference? Why would you say "coat divor" but not "tjurkijé" or something like that?

You are listening. Because, like 'coat divor', we generally don't know how to pronounce Türkiye.

How is this possibly off-topic? It is about how to pronounce this new word in English.

@WeatherVane I think the point is that until recently, we also didn't know how to spell Türkiye. Now that we've adopted the spelling, have we adopted the pronunciation (modulo phonemes we can't easily pronounce)? Or do we continue to pronounce it the way we always have?

@WeatherVane Good luck pronouncing [t̪ýɾ.ci.jɛ]. I count five different sounds impossible to occur in English, or four if you allow the flap R from the Scots.

@Mitch: It's Off Topic because we already have a way of pronouncing the name of that country in English, using English phonemes. Introducing non-English phonemes to satisfy the socio-political aspirations of non-Anglophone parties is just daft.

@Řídící No: The country has been known as Türkiye since 1923. It's mainly English-speaking countries that call it Turkey, probably because they can't pronounce it, though some Turks also say "Turkey". The pronunciation Tur-kee-yeah, where the 'u' is pronounced as the German "u" in "Führer" is close enough. The difficulty for we English-speaking people is that we don't pronounce a final "e", like the Turks do, and we don't have Umlauts, as in the Turkish ü.

See this article from around the time of the 2023 World Cup in Qatar about difficulties, even for most well-intentioned, in settling on a pronunciation. Proper nouns in general, and especially international place names, present a friction between linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism. The descriptivist answer simply tells you what pronunciation is most common, whether it's the one requested by those in charge of the proper noun or not.

I found something. Right at the beginning of this video, youtube.com/watch?v=NmvxGglPf_w, we hear the person twice pronouncing Türkiye in English sentences.

@Barmar - I feel like "colonialist thinking" kind of misunderstands the basic dynamics. Words, including toponyms or names, being altered as a result of adaptation to the pronunciation of a given language or because of translation is a very old and nearly universal phenomenon. Think Jesus being called χριστός because the listeners would not have understood the significance of מָשִׁיחַ. Or consider that Japanese people have called China 中国, among other things, which is pronounced something like chūgoku, and definitely not the same as 中華 is pronounced in China (zhōnghuá).

The relevance of colonialism is that it put an unprecedented number of far-flung societies in much closer, usually brutal, contact, which led to these sorts of linguistic phenomena becoming more common. But it isn't a specifically colonialist thing, any more than the existence of people with one African and one European parent is colonialist, even though colonialism also dramatically increased the frequency of this. However, it is still more respectful, with our modern technology and globalized world, to try to better approximate the original pronunciation of names and toponyms.

I wonder how much luck we (in the UK) would have asking the French, for instance, to use "United Kingdom" or "Great Britain" instead of "le Royaume Uni" or "la Grande Bretagne".

@Obie2.0 What does that have to do with Erdoğan wanting his country to be known by its proper name of Türkiye?

@BillJ - It's a response to a comment by Barmar, not a comment by Erdoğan. So...not much.

Do we also need to rename the bird, then?