Since most of us probably won’t be eating it for another 11 or 12 months, I think it’s time to give the turkey its due before we forget about it again.

The word turkey (used to refer to the bird) has a surprisingly convoluted etymology. And no, it’s not a coincidence that it’s also the name of a country…

Birds known as guinea fowl began to be transported from Madagascar (or Guinea: historians have many competing theories) to Turkey in the mid-15th century, and sold from there to the rest of Europe. The bird gradually became known as turkey cock, and then turkey for short. When the first Europeans came across very similar birds in America, they decided to call them turkeys too.

All fairly straightforward so far, but things get confusing when one looks at the word for turkey in other languages. You might first want to know what the Turkish word for turkey is, and the answer is…

hindi, which means Indian…

You see, lots of people were under the impression that turkeys were from India. This may have started in Turkey, where people knew guineafowl wasn’t native, but didn’t know where it really came from, so assumed India. This is also evident in the French word dinde, short for poulet d’Inde (Indian chicken). And the Dutch word is the very specific kalkoen, a contraction of Calicut-hoen, meaning hen from Calicut.

Yeesh! So what do they call it in India then? In Hindu it’s tarki, but some Indian dialects use piru or peru, the latter being how Portuguese sailors referred to the bird. The word probably spread around the world due to Portuguese exploration and colonisation (similar words for turkey can be found in Croatian, Hawaiian, Slovene, Pakistani Urdu, Galician, and Malay). And of course they called it peru as a reference to Peru, which is now a specific South-American country, but once referred to all Spanish-controlled American areas, including Mexico, where turkeys could be found.

But then in Malay it’s also known as ayam Belanda (Dutch chicken), and in Breton it’s yar-Spagn (Spanish chicken). It seems no-one could agree on where the bird came from, so next time you’re tucking into some turkey, try to appreciate the international linguistic odyssey it went on before arriving on your plate.