RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has had enough of bad puns that conflate Turkey, the country he has governed for two decades, with the ugly bird served for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Convinced that his power extends to the English language, late last year Mr Erdogan decreed that his country would henceforth be known to the rest of the world as Türkiye, as it is in Turkish. It plans to register with the United Nations under the new name. State institutions have begun using it already.

Despite the fortune spent on a new publicity campaign, including videos aired on Turkish Airlines the world over, Türkiye is not catching on. At a recent international forum in Antalya, on the country’s southern coast, diplomats did not appear in the least interested in using the new name (pronounced with a ü somewhat like the German one and a “yeah”-like ending). Their Turkish counterparts occasionally used the old one, then corrected themselves, then realised no one really cared. The only people who stayed on message, at least in public, were foreigners working for Turkey’s state propaganda channel, hired as panel moderators, who took turns garbling Türkiye. Mr Erdogan’s supporters nonetheless rejoice in the idea that foreigners will be made to call their country by its authentic name. Critics say the move is a populist gimmick.

Almost any place’s true name can be a matter for discussion. Three of Turkey’s neighbours officially call themselves Hellas, Sakartvelo and Hayastan—better known as Greece, Georgia and Armenia in English. Meanwhile Hindistan, the name for India in Turkish, can also mean “the country of turkeys”. There is no neutral, non-political way to refer to almost any square of the globe. Most names annoy somebody.

This is most obvious when a territory goes from belonging to one state to another. Westerners were accustomed to referring to cities in Ukraine as Kiev, Kharkov and Lvov. Some grumble at having to learn new names for them—Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv. But the old ones were not neutral. They were Russian, and after the country became independent many of its people wanted the Ukrainian versions to be used even in English. Outsiders’ decision to use Ukrainian place-names is now a political declaration of support for Ukraine’s very right to exist.

A countervailing argument holds that foreign places have long-established English names which it is perfectly normal for English-speakers (and publications) to use. English-speakers refer to Italy and Rome, not Italia and Roma, no matter what locals may say, and this is generally not controversial. For their part, Romans refer to Inghilterra and Londra. Unusually, Italian lobbyists persuaded the International Olympic Committee to officially dub the host of the Winter Olympics of 2006 “Torino”, a city universally known in English as Turin. But the committee could not force the change on others: some media outlets went with the Italian name, others stuck with the English equivalent.

Some calls for change involve colonial names or spellings that were imposed by outsiders. India-watchers have had to adjust to Mumbai (once Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai (Madras), while remembering that institutions like the Bombay Stock Exchange and the University of Madras continue to use their old monikers. Such renamings often purport to hark back to an unsullied past, but are really exercises in nationalist myth-making. Sometimes they are inarguable. Citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo (once Zaire) understandably wanted to rename their capital, Leopoldville, which recalled a Belgian ruler whose name was a byword for the worst in colonial brutality. It is now Kinshasa.

The trickiest cases involve not out-and-out Kinshasa-style renamings (which are almost always respected), but requests for English-speakers to abandon a well-established English name and adopt something similar, but closer to the natives’ own. The Czech Republic has a one-word name in Czech (Česko), and so the Czechs have asked for their country to be called Czechia in English. This has yet to catch on.

Populists and autocrats may think they can dictate place-names, but no amount of decrees can force people to say Türkiye instead of Turkey. And the greater the attempt to strong-arm them into doing so, the greater the chance they will stick with the old version out of stubbornness. As the widespread adoption of Kyiv shows, no one likes a bully.