When working with people of different nationalities and ethnicities I emphasize trying to pronounce their names correctly. Why is this different?

Not a Turk here, but I'm guessing it is equivalent to using latinx or Latin@. It is a signal that you are from a bubble that is out of touch with your intended audience. Most Latin people don't use these terms and don't put together really care for them, so it signals that you are more aligned with a third-party then with Latin people.

Because it's a nationalistic thing to insist that all languages spell your country's name in the script and spelling of the source language. It's a stupid move by the Erdogan government to get people to stop thinking about türkiye birds when they think of the Turkey country. Other countries get by just fine.

Germany, Alemania, Deutschland.

Mexico, Messico, Méjico.

Japan, Nippon, 日本.

China, Zhōngguó, 中国.

Every country gets by getting called different things in different languages. But Turkey insisting on the spelling just because they don't want to be associated to türkiye birds, where the birds are literally named after the country, is a silly move designed to stir nationalistic pride for their near totalitarian government.

One funny thing is that in Portuguese the word for turkey (the bird) is Perú… also the same word as the South American country. Turkey is Turquia though…

> Turkey is Turquia though…

The bird is named after a series of misconceptions, with different results in different places.

The country is named after the Turks; you expect it to be the same everywhere.

That's not always the right thing to do.

I'm from a language where you'll never get it right, and most people are pragmatic and don't care about names being the way our mothers do. That's a very Western thing.

Forcing us to try to teach you our language, or half-way butcherings, are considered obnoxious. Go with the English pronunciation. Do anything half-reasonable-sounding, and it's okay too. Don't visibly struggle each time you try to say my name.

For my name specifically, there's also an uncanny valley phenomenon. My name pronounced obviously wrong by an American doesn't raise flags. Americans mispronouncing my native name sounds horribly wrong.

What? If you would try to say my country's name in my native language instead of the English version when speaking English I would think you were a nutcase.

It might depend on country or person, but my name is already very hard to pronounce, asking me 2 or 3 times just prolongs the embarrassment

I find that impossible to achieve and believe others do. I have no expectation people getting my name right because, apart from other reasons, it contains sounds that do not exist in many standard languages. It would literally require training one to be able to produce new sounds, and that is just not practical at all, not to mention outright impossible for many to do accurately. I guess it is good to try to pronounce things good enough, but "correctly" I doubt.

US State Dept has started using Türkiye for its communications...

Governments are different as they legally have to do it.

I don't think it's illegal requirement, they just choose to respect the wishes of the receiving government.

Of course. The will (and should) use the name the country officially defines to be the correct one. Why would they refuse and cause a diplomatic fuss over such a trivial thing?

This is AFAIK a result of trying to get Erdogan to accept the NATO application from Sweden and Finland.

NATO head Jens Stoltenberg started saying Turkey but then changed to Türkiye before the big NATO summit in Madrid last summer.

Interesting. From the State Department:

"Note: The official conventional long-form and short-form names remain “Republic of Turkey” and “Turkey”, respectively. “Republic of Türkiye” should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside “Türkiye” in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public."

Source: https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-turkey/

I do agriculture stuff in Turkey. This has been a useful heuristic. I estimate that 90% of the people I have faced who get angry or make a big deal about this are bureaucrats who didn't get into their position by merit.

Aotearoa New Zealand will be same

This is nothing about trust. I'm using the officially declared word to describe the country. Nothing to do with ideology or views.

Serious question here. As someone with closer ties to the Middle East than me, how do you look at people who pronounce Iraq correctly, as "Ih-rahk," compared to the usual American pronunciation, "Eye-rack"?

As someone who was in that country for a year all over the place with a rifle attached to my chest, Americans always ask me about my exciting vacation there. As an American convervative myself, people's heads are blown whether the are left or right leaning when I pronounce it as "Ih-rahk." At this point I find the reactions fairly comical and get a kick out of experimenting on people, much to the dismay of my wife, who thinks I should just go with "Eye-rack" to stop embarrassing her.

By the way, I pronounce Turkey as like a Thanksgiving "Turkey."

Anecdotally I was told once upon a time by a first generation immigrant from Oman that you should pronounce a countries name as they pronounce it, as a respect thing. I thought more about it, and if I heard someone say United States as "Ooonited States," I wouldn't care one bit, but there really is only one way to pronounce the United States it so it's not really a fair comparison.