With the US Thanksgiving holiday approaching, millions of American families will soon sit down to a turkey dinner.
That makes it as good a time as any to ask an important question: Why are turkeys, which are not actually from Turkey, called turkeys?
It’s a story of commerce, cuisine, and general confusion.
The bird that we know as a turkey is actually native to the Americas, where it was first domesticated by indigenous peoples thousands of years ago. Until Columbus showed up, no one in Europe had ever seen what we call a “turkey,” much less eaten one.
But in the 15th and 16th centuries, traders based in the Mamluk and Ottoman Empires – both known colloquially as “Turkey” – began exporting various species of tasty, exotic guinea fowl to Europe from Africa. People began referring to those birds first as “Turkey birds.”
Then, in the 16th century, colonists in the Americas began sending back to the Old Country the guinea fowl-like birds they found there. And people called those birds the same thing: turkeys. So in a case of mistaken identity, turkeys became turkeys.
But all of this naturally raises an even more pressing question: What are turkeys called in Turkey? (Türkiye, these days.)
Glad you asked. In Turkey, where turkeys are not from, turkeys are referred to as hindi, meaning “Indian birds.” This comes from the mistaken belief that the turkey-rich lands that Columbus and the other explorers had “discovered” were actually “India.”
You find this error reflected in the Russian word indeyka, the Georgian indauri, and the French dinde, a contraction of de Inde, meaning “from India.” The Dutch are, as is often the case, weirdly specific – for them it’s a kalkoen, meaning a “Calcutta hen.”
But we are still far from where the bird is actually from, the Americas.
And there the plot thickens further. In Brazil, the bird is known in Portuguese as a perú, because from the Portuguese empire’s perspective the birds came from somewhere near the Spanish-controlled territory of Peru. But in today’s Peru, a turkey is known in Spanish as a pavo, from a generic Latin word for pheasants.
In fact, to find an Indigenous word for this Indigenous bird, you have to go to Guatemala, where the local Spanish dialect calls it a chompipe, a word of Mayan origin thought to describe the sounds the bird makes.
Of course, everyone hears it differently. The Czechs call the bird a “krocan,” because that’s what it sounds like to them, while the Italians hear our “gobble gobble” as a tacca tacca, giving us their word for the bird: tacchino.
It gets weirder still. Macedonians call the bird a misirka, from the Arabic name for Egypt, Misr, which was the heart of the “Turkish” Mamluk empire. But in Egypt, it’s known in Arabic as diik ruumi meaning “Roman rooster.”
What’s Rome got to do with Turkey? A lot! In Arabic, “Roman” can refer to the Byzantine Empire, whose capital was Constantinople, later Istanbul, which is, to bring things full circle, Turkey.
So in a year when you may want to avoid talking openly about topics like trade, colonialism, and immigration at the Thanksgiving dinner table, you can now talk about all of those things by just talking turkey. Enjoy.
