Which surnames were banned in 1934, and why?

What did the law ban?

Article 3 of the Surname Law is one sentence. It says surnames may not be names of ranks or offices, of tribes, or of foreign races and nations, nor names that offend public decency or are disgusting or ridiculous.

That makes four groups:

1. Names of military ranks and civil offices.
2. Names of tribes.
3. Names of foreign races and nations.
4. Names that offend public decency, or are disgusting or ridiculous.

The verb matters: such surnames “may not be used”. The rule covered surnames people already had, not only new choices.

What did the regulation add?

The Surname Regulation split those bans over five articles and widened them a little:

• Article 7: names of foreign races and nations may not be surnames.
• Article 8: surnames that express belonging to a tribe or clan may not be used or newly given.
• Article 9: surnames that denote ranks or offices of the “old or new” state may not be used.
• Article 10: on top of indecent, ridiculous and disgusting names, “insulting” names are banned too.
• Article 11: surnames that imply a link to famous historical figures may not be used unless official records or documents prove the link.

Three changes stand out. Clan was added next to tribe. The rank ban now expressly covered ranks and offices of the “old” state as well as the new. And names claiming a link to famous figures, which the law had treated as grounds for a lawsuit (Article 6), became an outright ban.

The regulation also set a positive rule: new surnames were to be taken from Turkish (Article 5). That is a standard, not a ban. A name was not acceptable merely because it was not forbidden; it was also expected to come from Turkish.

Why ban ranks and titles?

Neither the law nor the regulation states its reasons. Read together with the laws around them, though, the logic is visible.

On 26 November 1934, the same year, Law No. 2590 abolished titles and honorifics such as ağa, hacı, hafız, hoca, molla, efendi, bey, beyefendi, paşa, hanım, hanımefendi and hazretleri. It said citizens would be referred to “by their names only” before the law and in official documents. See the law abolishing titles.

Letting those titles return as surnames would have undone that. Article 3 of the Surname Law and Article 9 of the regulation closed the gap. Article 6 of the law kept “titles established by law” out of the ban’s reach.

Why ban names linked to famous people?

Article 11 of the regulation accepted a surname claiming kinship with a famous historical figure only if documents proved it. As a new national system of surnames was set up, the rule stopped undocumented claims of descent from entering the official register. The text says no more than that.

A similar logic was applied to the surname Atatürk. Law No. 2622 made it his alone: nobody else could take it, and nobody could use it with words added before or after. See Atatürk, İnönü and assigned surnames.

Where does the list of banned endings come from?

One sentence is repeated across the web: the Surname Regulation banned the endings -yan, -of, -ef, -viç, -is, -dis, -pulos, -aki, -zade, -mahdumu, -veled and -bin.

That list is not in the regulation. We read the 1934 text as published in the Resmî Gazete and the text in force today. It is not in the Surname Law either. The only rule in these texts about endings is that a surname is used “on its own or together with oğlu” (Article 6).

We could not trace where the list first appeared to a reliable source. It may come from a circular, an implementing instruction or a later summary, but we have seen no document that shows this. So we describe it as an often-repeated claim whose source is unclear. If you have a documented source, please write to us.

Were the bans enforced?

The law built in a route. Under Article 6, the public prosecutor, on notice from the civil administrator, could ask a court to make someone change a banned surname. The 1934 regulation told registry clerks not to enter names that broke Articles 7 to 12, and to report them to the district or provincial governor.

Even so, surnames that broke Article 3 evidently made it into the registers. In 2017, Law No. 7039, and in 2019, Law No. 7196, opened time-limited windows in which “surnames contrary to Article 3 of Surname Law No. 2525” could be changed once without a court order. Such a provision presumes those names exist in the register. The laws do not say which names, or how many people, were affected. See changing a surname today.

Which rules apply now?

Article 3 of the law and Articles 5 to 11 of the regulation are still in force. A new surname must come from Turkish and avoid those bans. To change a name that breaks them, the public prosecutor brings a case before the civil court where the person lives (Regulation, Article 12, 2009 text).

One note. This site describes the linguistic origin of surnames. The language a word comes from says nothing about the ancestry of the people who carry that surname today. We treat the 1934 bans in the same way: as rules about word forms.