The expansion of Western colonialism only complicated matters: Malaysians call turkey ayam blander (“Dutch chicken”), while Cambodians opt for moan barang (“French chicken”). Some Indian dialects, however, use the word piru or peru, the latter being how the Portuguese refer to the American fowl, which is not native to Peru but might have become popular in Portugal as Spanish and Portuguese explorers conquered the New World.
So what is the bird called in India? It might be hindi in Turkey, but in Hindi it’s ṭarki. These names might have arisen from the mistaken belief at the time that the New World was the Indies, or the sense that the turkey trade passed through India. Then there’s the oddly specific Dutch word kalkoen, which, as a contraction of Calicut-hoen, literally means “hen from Calicut,” a major Indian commercial center at the time. The French originally called the American bird poulet d’Inde (literally “chicken from India”), which has since been abbreviated to dinde, and similar terms exist in languages ranging from Polish to Hebrew to Catalan. The Turks “knew the bird wasn’t theirs,” Forsyth explains, so they “made a completely different mistake and called it a hindi, because they thought the bird was probably Indian.” They weren’t alone. Turkey, which has no native turkeys, does not call turkey turkey. Here’s where things get even more bewildering.
Dan Jurafsky, another linguist, argues that Europeans imported guinea fowl from Ethiopia (which was sometimes mixed up with India) via the Mamluk Turks, and then confused the birds with North American fowl shipped across the Atlantic by the Portuguese. The etymology expert Mark Forsyth, meanwhile, claims that Turkish traders brought guinea fowl to England from Madagascar, off the coast of southeast Africa, and that Spanish conquistadors then introduced American fowl to Europe, where they were conflated with the “turkeys” from Madagascar. When British settlers arrived in Massachusetts, they applied the same terms to the wild fowl they spotted in the New World, even though the birds were a different species than their African counterparts. The linguist Mario Pei theorized that more than five centuries ago, Turks from the commercial hub of Constantinople (which the Ottomans conquered in the mid-15th century) sold wild fowl from Guinea in West Africa to European markets, leading the English to refer to the bird as “turkey cock” or “turkey coq” ( coq being French for “rooster”), and eventually “turkey” for short. How exactly the word turkey made its way into the English language is in dispute.
Or, more precisely, from Turkish merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries. As you might have suspected, the English term for the avian creature likely comes from Turkey the country. But turkey the word is a geographic mess-a tribute to the vagaries of colonial trade and conquest. “Turkey” the bird is native to North America. Within the turkey lies the tangled history of the world.
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