Jacob Pratt via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:

It is far too early for a change like this to be made. Until (and if) Türkiye becomes more common than Turkey in ordinary usage, don't expect anything to change.

And just to set expectations, the time range you should be thinking of here is on the order of ten years. Spellings are highly persistent. (Admittedly, this specific one is less of an issue for tz because the zones, which are the difficult names to change, are named after cities rather than countries, so this would mostly affect comments and ancillary data files.) Currently, an English language Google search for Turkiye returns almost entirely pages about the effort by the Turkish government to change the official name, whereas an English language Google search for Turkey returns all the expected search results for the country. (365M results versus 8.6B results, too, although I wouldn't put much store in those results since it looks like Google does some amount of "autocorrecting" Turkiye to Turkey under the hood.) (This led me down a rabbit hole wondering about Czechia vs. Czech Republic, although that appears to be a different case where both names are officially correct although I believe Czechia is increasingly used by international bodies.) -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Max Harmony via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:

On 06 Jun 2022, at 13.56, Russ Allbery via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:

...

(365M results versus 8.6B results, too, although I wouldn't put much store in those results since it looks like Google does some amount of "autocorrecting" Turkiye to Turkey under the hood.)

Were you able to filter out results for the bird?

Er, yes, good point, those numbers are really meaningless. (I did try to filter out the bird, but that didn't help with filtering out the numerous places all over the world that are named after the bird, so the count is hopeless.) -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

On Mon, 6 Jun 2022 at 15:31, Michael H Deckers via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:

On 2022-06-06 17:56, Russ Allbery via tz wrote:

...

And just to set expectations, the time range you should be thinking of here is on the order of ten years.

I disagree: as the name "Turkey" does not appear in the interfaces produced by tzdb (not even in tzselect), the change can and should be effected as soon as it is internationally agreed (if it is, anyway). That's what we did when Swaziland was renamed Eswatini a couple of years ago.

And (somewhat) similarly with North Macedonia. I agree that commentary-only changes warrant a lower threshold. Furthermore, it's much easier and less disruptive in such cases to justify inclusion of a few alternate names, as it doesn't affect the data at all, as we did with Eswatini: # Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) Even if this change is formally adopted by several international bodies, most people will take longer to adapt their usage, and we should keep the data files useful to them, as well. -- Tim Parenti