Speaking Of Words: Let's Talk Turkey

By Michael Ferber, Speaking of Words, InDepth NH

The bird we know as the turkey, which we eat at Thanksgiving and see walking around our New Hampshire woods and lawns much of the year, is native to North America, mainly in the United States but with some in Mexico. Its Linnaean name is Meleagris gallopavo. There is another species of the same genus, Meleagris ocellata, found only in the Yucatán peninsula. So why is it called a turkey?

The Turks don’t claim it. In Turkey the word for it is hindi, which means “from India.” The French agree: their word for it is dinde, originally d’Inde, which also means “from India.” The Russian word is indeyka. The Dutch word is kalkoen, which is said to mean “Calcutta hen”; the Scandinavian words are similar (Danish kalkun) and may come from the Dutch word. In Lithuanian it is kalakutas, and that makes me think that Calcutta is not in play here, but rather Calicut. In any case, what has the bird to do with India?

Some of the main languages of India adopt the English word: tarki. So there is little help there. In Arabic a turkey-like bird is known as the dik rumi, meaning “Roman rooster.” But “Rome” (Rum) here refers to Byzantium or Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire until 1453. That brings us back to Turkey, where the city is now called Istanbul, itself from a Greek phrase, eis ten polin, “into the city,” or “downtown.”

The modern Greek word for the bird is galopoula, which is sometimes translated as “French chicken,” but it hearkens to the Latin word gallus, which means “rooster” but looks like the adjective for Gallia or Gaul, that is, France. (The Gallic rooster or coq gaulois has been a symbol of France for centuries, thanks to a pun.) Linnaeus’s Latin word for the North American species is gallopavo, which means “chicken peacock.” The Spanish call a turkey a pavo, feminine pava, as if it were a peacock, but they call a peacock a pavo real, a “royal peacock” (or “royal turkey”).

The Portuguese word for the bird is peru. That puts us on the right continent, at least, though neither of the two Meleagris species are found in Peru.

Pet-peeve digression: In 2022 the Turkish government insisted that its country should be called (and spelled) Türkiye in English, with an altered first syllable and three syllables in all. The two dots, which resemble a German umlaut, do not function like one in Turkish, to my ears; in any case they change the vowel sound to something different from any English phoneme. What right do the Turks have to tell us how to pronounce their country in English, using two sounds (ü and flapped r) we don’t have? “Turkey” is close enough. The Chinese name for China is not remotely like “China,” but the Chinese don’t seem to be complaining. Are the Germans demanding that we call their country Deutschland? Back around 1970, the fascist “Colonels” of Greece asked us to call the country Hellas and the people Hellenes. But they still urged us to “visit Greece.” I think the Turks should be grateful that we come close enough to their name and they should stop acting like turkeys.

So where are we? The good old American turkey is not from Turkey, not from India, not from France, and not from Peru. It seems that every country blames the poor bird on some other country. At least the Italians have stayed out of this game; they call the bird tacchino, feminine tacchina. If that looks a little like Turk, it’s an illusion. It seems to be onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of a turkey: tac tac tac.

There are two theories that try to explain the name “turkey” for the American bird. We get a hint of one in Linnaeus’s name for the genus, Meleagris, which is the Ancient Greek word for the guinea fowl, exported from Guinea in west Africa. It was well-known to Europeans long before Europeans “discovered” American turkeys, and was often brought to Europe via Istanbul by Turkish (Ottoman) tradesmen. Known first in England as “turkey cock (or hen),” its African origin was more or less forgotten, and its name was reduced to the port that then re-exported them to western Europe. When English colonists met the American turkey, they applied the name of the similar, though smaller, bird they already knew. Our bird, then, has a misapplied misnomer of a name.

The other theory is that the American bird, perhaps both species of it, was shipped out of Mexico by Spanish or Portuguese traders and, like the guinea fowl, transshipped via Istanbul. That seems unlikely to me, as I don’t see why the entrepot would be Istanbul if the ships were from western Europe. The first explanation seems more plausible, but then I don’t see why the Portuguese or Spanish might not be the usual middlemen for the African bird, rather than the Turks.

Then why India? Why Calicut? The Ottoman Empire did not extend that far, though it no doubt had plenty of contact with India by sea or land. But the bird did not come from India. Could it be that the attribution goes back to Columbus’s mistake? He thought he was in the Indies (now the East Indies), which were sort of off India; he never realized he had come across a continent unknown to Europe. We now call his Indies the West Indies, and it may be that it took some time before Europeans knew that the two Indies were as far apart as the whole Pacific Ocean and then some. So for a while the bird could be said to come from “India,” as the native Americans could be called “Indians.”

And Calicut? Unlike Calcutta, now officially called Kolkata, which is in Bengal in eastern India, Calicut, now officially Kozhikode, is on the west coast (Malabar) and thus much more accessible to Europe and Africa. Vasco da Gama reached it in 1498, and the Portuguese dominated the coast for centuries. Calicut was a major port, through which many products passed, including, of course, the cotton cloth called calico. So perhaps “Calicut” simply stood in for the whole country; Indian products all seemed to come from there. But not the bird.

As for Peru, the best explanation I have seen is that the land called Peru was once much larger, and it bordered on Brazil, which was settled by Portuguese colonists. To them Peru may have referred to Spanish America as a whole, in parts of which the bird was common.

That’s the best I can do with these names. So show some pity for our poor turkey, wrongly named wherever it went, just the way the Native Americans got called “Indians” because Columbus had no idea where he was. The bird has gotten no respect. Maybe this year we should eat tofurkey instead. I think it comes from San Francisco, homeland of tofu.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu. Website: michaelkferber.com.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.