Turkey Had No Surnames Until 1934 — And You Can Still Read It in the Top 10

Turkey's most common surname means "does not give up." The second means "rock." The third means "iron." Then: steel, star, hawk, lightning, pure Turk, enlightened, pure iron.

That is not a coincidence, a stereotype, or a translator taking liberties. It is a timestamp. Until 1934, Turks had no hereditary surnames at all. When the law arrived and every household had to choose one inside two years, people did not reach for a lineage — they had none to reach for. They reached for a word.

You can see it in the data without opening a history book. Our Turkish surname dataset holds 1,337 entries, and the entire head of the list is common nouns and adjectives. Here is the top ten. The weight column is the relative frequency the dataset assigns each entry; the 1,337 entries carry a combined weight of 5,005.

And the next five, which do not break the pattern:

Fifteen names. Not one of them is a patronymic, a village, a founding ancestor or a trade. Compare that with almost anywhere in Europe, where the top of the list is Smith, Miller, Johnson, Da Silva, Kowalski — occupations, patronymics, places. Turkey's list reads like a set of mottos, because that is roughly what it is.

What was there before

Ottoman naming did not use fixed, heritable family names. A person was identified by a given name plus whatever combination did the job: their father's name, a title (efendi, bey, paşa), a place of origin, a trade, a nickname, a religious honorific. It worked at village scale and failed at state scale — the new republic found it produced confusion in birth records, difficulty in economic dealings, and a serious problem for conscription. If a town holds four hundred men called Mehmet, "Mehmet, son of Ahmet" is not an address.

The law

The Surname Law — Soyadı Kanunu, Law No. 2525 — was passed by the Grand National Assembly on 21 June 1934 with 15 articles, and published in the Resmî Gazete on 2 July 1934 (issue 2741). The obligation took effect at the start of January 1935, and citizens had two years to comply. Miss the deadline and you faced a fine of 5 to 50 lira — and a surname assigned to you by a local official.

The scale is the part worth pausing on. Turkey had roughly 16 million citizens. Every household head had to invent, choose or accept a hereditary name for a family that had never had one, inside twenty-four months. There is no European parallel; surname adoption elsewhere took centuries and mostly happened by accretion, not decree.

The law also said what a surname could not be. It could not refer to military rank or civil office. It could not name a tribe, or a foreign race or ethnicity. It could not be offensive or ridiculous. "Historical" names required genealogical evidence. And it had to be taken from the Turkish language — which meant that a set of common name-endings went out of use: -yan, -of / -ov / -iç, -is / -dis / -pulos / -aki, -zade, Bin- / İbn-.

Two companion laws followed in November 1934: one abolished the Ottoman honorifics — efendi, bey, paşa — that surnames were replacing, and the other granted Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, on 24 November 1934, reserved to him alone.

This article is about what happened to the vocabulary. The law's implementation was uneven across the country, and researchers — Meltem Türköz's Naming and Nation-building in Turkey is the standard treatment — document that in some regions households chose freely while in others officials assigned names from a list without consultation. That history is real and is not our subject here; what our data can speak to is the linguistic result.

Did Atatürk hand out surnames?

Partly. The popular version has him distributing names to the nation; the documented version is narrower and more interesting.

He genuinely did suggest surnames — to his circle, in private meetings and at his dinner table at Çankaya, and he made sure the suggestions were taken. İsmet Paşa became İnönü, after the battlefield of his 1921 victories. Mahmut Celal Bey became Bayar. Tevfik Rüştü Bey became Aras. Ali Fethi Bey became Okyar.

But that is a few dozen people out of sixteen million, and even inside that circle he could be overruled: Chief of the General Staff Fevzi Paşa insisted on Çakmak as a family tradition, and Atatürk, who disliked it, let it stand — reportedly grumbling that it was "not at all pleasant for a commander." He did not even choose his own: the Grand National Assembly gave him Atatürk.

For everyone else the machinery was mundane. Interior Minister Şükrü Kaya had a depository of 5,500 approved Turkish surnames certified in 1934. Guidebooks were printed in 1934–35 reprinting the law and suggesting how to build a name. And muhtars — village and neighbourhood headmen — served as the frontline registrars, consulting the head of the family, observing what the household was locally known for, or working down the official list. Some allocated names to whole villages by sequential letter.

That is where "Yılmaz" comes from. Not from an ancestor. From a catalogue, a headman and a deadline.

Why the words are the shape they are

Once you know the mechanism, the vocabulary explains itself.

Given twenty-four months and a blank line on a form, what do you write? Something that sounds like the family you would like to be. So the list is strength (Demir, Çelik, Kaya, Özdemir — iron, steel, rock, pure iron), predators (Şahin, Doğan, Arslan/Aslan, Kurt "wolf", Kaplan "tiger" — all in our file), weapons and force (Kılıç "sword", Yıldırım "lightning", Şimşek "flash of lightning"), and character (Yılmaz "undaunted", Çetin "tough", Korkmaz "does not fear").

A grammatical detail is worth noticing, because it is invisible in translation. Yılmaz is not a noun. The verb yılmak means "to be daunted, to give up out of fear"; -maz is the negative aorist. Yılmaz is a finite verb form meaning "he/she does not flinch." The most common surname in Turkey is, literally, a sentence. Korkmaz ("does not fear") and Solmaz ("does not fade") are built the same way — a name pattern that is essentially a slogan.

The Öz- cluster shows the era directly. Öz means "own, genuine, pure, essence," and it prefixes freely: Öztürk ("pure Turk"), Özdemir ("pure iron"), Özkan ("pure blood", weight 24 in our file), Özcan, Özkul. Öztürk at #8 is a name chosen in the 1930s that says what it was chosen for.

And one entry quietly contradicts the law that produced it. Şahin — #6, 685,727 bearers — is not a Turkish word by origin. It is a loan from Persian şāhīn, a bird of prey, cognate with Avestan saēna and Sanskrit śyena. (The classical explanation linking it to şāh, "king," is folk etymology — the resemblance is only phonetic.) By 1934 it was ordinary Turkish dictionary vocabulary, which is presumably why nobody blinked. But the requirement that a surname be "taken from the Turkish language" is doing lighter work here than it sounds.

Aydın deserves a note too, because it is genuinely ambiguous and English lists usually pick one gloss and hide the other. Turkish aydın means "lit, bright" as an adjective, and "cultured, educated, forward-thinking; intellectual" as a noun. It is also a province in the Aegean. A family taking Aydın in 1935 could have meant any of the three, and the data cannot tell you which.

What the numbers say about how young these names are

Two figures in our file both point at the same thing.

The top ten carry 11.2% of the file's weight (561 of 5,005). In the actual population the top ten come to roughly 8.7%: the Turkish civil registry's 2024 figures give Yılmaz 1,174,516 bearers, Kaya 894,360, Demir 871,107, Çelik 714,184, Yıldız 693,634, Şahin 685,727, Yıldırım 664,229, Öztürk 585,053, Aydın 579,161 and Özdemir 554,724 — 7,416,695 people against a population of about 85.7 million. The gap between 11.2% and 8.7% is not an error: 1,337 names are not all of Turkey, and a list that covers the common head but not the long tail necessarily concentrates its weight higher than the country does.

Either way, ~9% for the top ten is remarkably concentrated for a country of 85 million. Britain, Germany, Poland and Ukraine all sit around 4–6%; France and Italy around 2–3%. Turkey is about twice as top-heavy as Western Europe, and the reason is the 1934 deadline: sixteen million people picking from the same finite pool of admirable Turkish nouns, in the same two years, with many of them working from the same 5,500-name list, will collide. Centuries of organic surname formation produce variety. A decree produces Yılmaz 1.17 million times.

And 422 of our 1,337 entries — 31.6% — sit at the lowest weight in the file. Turkey's surname distribution is a very heavy head on a very long thin tail. Third-party name aggregators put the number of distinct Turkish surnames at roughly 400,000 (an unofficial estimate; the registry publishes rankings, not a headline count of distinct names). Both facts are the same fact: everybody could invent, so there are hundreds of thousands of names — but everybody was inventing from the same small vocabulary of virtues, so a handful of them ran away with the country.

The one-line version

European surnames record who your ancestors were — whose son, which village, what trade. Turkish surnames are less than a century old, and they record what a family wanted to be called in 1935. That is why the top of the list translates so cleanly and so strangely: undaunted, rock, iron, steel, star, hawk, lightning, pure Turk, enlightened, pure iron. It is not a family tree. It is a shelf of words, handed out on a deadline, and it is still there in the data.

Data as of 2026-07-17. Figures described as "in the file" are computed from our tr_TR surname dataset: 1,337 entries, combined weight 5,005; top ten carrying weight 561 (11.21%); 422 entries (31.6%) at the file's minimum weight.

Sources:

• Türkiye'de en yaygın kullanılan soyadları: Yılmaz, Kaya ve Demir — Anadolu Ajansı, reporting the General Directorate of Civil Registration and Nationality (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri, NVİ) address-based registry figures for 2024. Source of all bearer counts.
• En Çok Kullanılan Soyad İstatistiği — NVİ, official surname ranking (PDF).
• Surname Law (Turkey)) — Wikipedia. Law No. 2525, 21 June 1934, 15 articles; Resmî Gazete 2 July 1934 no. 2741; effect January 1935 and the two-year deadline; the 5–50 lira fine; the restrictions and banned affixes; the November 1934 companion laws; Şükrü Kaya's 5,500-name depository; ~16 million citizens; pre-1934 Ottoman naming.
• Soyadı Kanunu — Atatürk Ansiklopedisi (official Turkish state encyclopedia). Atatürk's personal suggestions (İnönü, Bayar, Aras, Okyar) and the Çakmak episode; the muhtar-led registration mechanism.
• The surname law: A profound change in Turkish history — Daily Sabah, 22 June 2015. Contemporary context and the naming guidebooks.
• Meltem Türköz, Naming and Nation-building in Turkey: The 1934 Surname Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Surname narratives and the state–society boundary, Middle Eastern Studies 43(6). Standard academic treatment of implementation.
• Meanings: Türk Dil Kurumu Güncel Türkçe Sözlük via sozluk.gov.tr — yılmak / yılmaz, aydın, doğan (Falco peregrinus), çelik, yıldırım, çetin, kaya, demir, yıldız, kılıç.
• şahin — Nişanyan Sözlük — Persian şāhīn, cognate with Avestan saēna and Sanskrit śyena; the şāh link identified as folk etymology.
• aslan — Wiktionary — Turkish aslan < arslan < Proto-Turkic \**arsïlan*; the -lan predator suffix shared with kaplan, sırtlan, yılan.

A note on verification. Our file's ordering of the top ten matches the 2024 civil-registry ranking exactly, name for name, including positions 4–6 (Çelik, Yıldız, Şahin). An earlier version of our data carried the registry's older (2013) order at those three ranks — Şahin, Çelik, Yıldız — which has since been corrected. Note also that where a dataset's weights are derived from a registry, agreement with that same registry is a consistency check, not independent confirmation.