The Turkish government recently opened up to the public tailored genealogical results for every individual. I’ve taken advantage of this to trace my own ancestors back to the 1800s. Something of note is that I can find no trace of any Turkish person with an actual Turkic name until the republican period, when a conscious national movement towards Turkic names began (and today, Perso-Arabic names are becoming less and less common).

What is the reason Turkish people continued to speak Turkish and have largely Turkish customs and traditions, but not a single Turk from the Ottoman period (or since the 10th century, really) seems to have had a Turkic name for close to a thousand years? In Europe, Latin and Germanic and Celtic names abound and abounded in medieval and early modern times as well as today (alongside Hebrew religious names), so how did Turks so thoroughly give up their native pre-Islamic naming conventions? This also applies to other Turkic countries of Central Asia, where native names also don’t survive in favor of Perso-Arabic ones.