The airline “Turkish Airlines” should not change its Turkish name “Turk Hava Yollari” after all. However, the English company name will be abandoned as announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan said on Wednesday: “Our national airline will no longer operate its international flights under the name ‘Turkish Airlines’ but with the name ‘Turk Hava Yollari'”. In doing so, he corrected a much-discussed statement from the previous day that the airline would be called “Türkiye Hava Yollari” in the future. This may have been a slip of the tongue.

In Turkish, the airline is already known as Türk Hava Yollari. The announcement on Tuesday, according to which “Türk” would have been replaced by “Türkiye”, was met with a great deal of incomprehension from Turkish-speaking users on the Internet. “Turk” is translated the adjective Turkish, “Türkiye” the Turkish country name.

The announcement came almost two weeks after Turkey called on the United Nations and other international organizations to refrain from using the English term “Turkey” and to call the country “Türkiye”.