Requested Move revisted zmir I m going to bring this up again because having been in Turkey for awhile I ve noticed that English sources usually distinguish and from their un umlauted counterparts and sometimes distinguish and and rarely write the dotless i in the lower case but I have never seen zmir or stanbul except in Turkish sources I find an almost definitive list of reliable sources using Izmir here and poking around expat forums shows English usage in Turkey is exclusively without the capital I find examples here and here If I search for Izmir and Bakirkoy on MyMerhaba the only one of these sites I heard of before googling I find dotless Izmir and umlauted Bakirk y I also find direct evidence of the distinction between umlauted vowels or and the dotted i here here And this forum shows the difference in usage between Turks advertising apartments and foreigners seeking them Basically common usage in both reliable sources and in English among people living in Turkey spells it Izmir The only people who spell it zmir are Turks and even then they don t always spell it that way when writing in English