Turkish: a short portrait

Turkish belongs to the Turkic languages, a family that stretches from south-eastern Europe to Siberia and China. It is not related to English — which is why hardly a word sounds familiar at first, and why its sentences follow quite different rules.

Its closest relatives are Azerbaijani and Turkmen. A Turkish speaker often understands Azerbaijani after a short time. Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tatar are Turkic languages too, but much more distant.

The ancestors of today’s speakers came from Central Asia. From the 11th century Oghuz Turkic tribes settled in Anatolia, and over the centuries their language became Turkish.

The oldest longer texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions from the 8th century, carved in stone in what is now Mongolia. Their language, Old Turkic, is an early Turkic language. Modern Turkish does not descend directly from it, but is related to it.

In the Ottoman Empire Turkish was written in Arabic letters, and the language of the educated took in a great many words from Arabic and Persian. The Ottoman Turkish of government and poetry was therefore hard for many ordinary people to understand.

In 1928 Turkey switched by law to a Latin alphabet that fits the pronunciation exactly. In 1932 the Türk Dil Kurumu was founded, and over the following decades it replaced many loanwords with words built from Turkish roots. That is where the word pairs you still hear today come from: cevap and yanıt for “answer”, kelime and sözcük for “word”.

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and, alongside Greek, of the Republic of Cyprus, where it is spoken mainly in the north of the island. There are old Turkish-speaking communities in the Balkans, especially in Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

Since the 1960s Turkish has also been the family language of many people in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and other countries. So you may already hear it in your own neighbourhood — and you can start conversations in it without travelling.

Within Turkey the language sounds different from region to region, especially in pronunciation and in some words. But the spelling, grammar and vocabulary of standard Turkish are the same everywhere, and that is what you learn here.

The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. There is no q, no w and no x; instead there are ç (like “ch” in “church”), ş (like “sh”), ö, ü, the soft ğ and the dotless ı. Each letter stands for one sound, so almost every word is read exactly as it is written — a relief after English spelling.

Some letters sound different from what you are used to: c sounds like the “j” in “jam” (cami, mosque), j like the “s” in “pleasure”, and y always like the “y” in “yes”. The ğ is usually not pronounced at all; it just lengthens the vowel before it: dağ, mountain.

Two letters need care. i and ı are different sounds, and so are their capitals: İ and I. That is why İstanbul is written with a dot — and a forgotten dot sometimes turns one word into another.

Turkish adds on. Where English puts articles, prepositions and helper verbs in front of a word, Turkish puts endings after it, one after another and in a fixed order: evis “house”evler“houses”evlerimiz“our houses”evlerimizde“in our houses” Linguists call this agglutination.

To make it sound right, the endings adapt to the word. This is vowel harmony: after a front vowel comes a front one, after a back vowel a back one — evde “in the house”, but okulda “at school”. At first that is the biggest change; after a few weeks you will hear when an ending does not fit.

In return, much is simpler than you might think. There is no grammatical gender and no word for “the”, and the verbs are almost entirely regular. If you can form a tense with one verb, you can form it with nearly all of them.

Many everyday words come from Arabic and Persian, such as kitap (book), dünya (world) or hafta (week). Later, words like kuaför (hairdresser) and asansör (lift) came from French, and from English came words such as futbol and internet.

In the other direction Turkish words have travelled into many languages, English included: yoghurt comes from yoğurt, kiosk from the garden pavilion köşk, and coffee reached Europe through Turkish kahve. Kebab, baklava and doner are newer arrivals.

The verb comes at the end: Ben her sabah çay içerim means literally “I every morning tea drink”. English puts the verb in the middle, so this takes some getting used to — but once you have it, the rest of the sentence falls into place.

There is no verb “to have”. You say that something exists: Bir kardeşim var, literally “my sibling exists” — I have a brother or a sister. And there are no separate words for “he” and “she”: o stands for both.

And a distinction English only makes with extra words: with -di you tell what you experienced yourself, with -miş what you only heard or worked out. Gelmiş means roughly “he has come, apparently” or “he seems to have come”.

Short facts to wonder at. One at a time, they also turn up at the end of a practice round — folded away, so they never get in the way.

1. Turkish endings adapt their vowels to the word: evler (houses), but kitaplar (books). This is called vowel harmony.
2. Turkish adds ending after ending: evlerimizden means “from our houses” — one word where English needs three.
3. Turkish has two i’s: with a dot (i, İ) and without (ı, I). kır (countryside) and kir (dirt) are two different words.
4. There is only one word for “he”, “she” and “it”: o. Turkish has no grammatical gender.
5. The verb comes at the end of the sentence: Ben çay içiyorum — literally “I tea am-drinking”.
6. The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. q, w and x are not among them.
7. The ğ (“soft g”) is hardly pronounced; it usually lengthens the vowel before it: dağ (mountain).
8. With the ending -miş you show that you have only heard or worked something out: gelmiş, “he has come, apparently”.
9. Many languages, English among them, took the word yoğurt from Turkish — and “kiosk” from köşk.
10. The word coffee reached Europe via Turkish kahve.
11. Turkish is closely related to Azerbaijani and Turkmen; Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz are Turkic languages too.
12. On 26 September Turkey celebrates Language Day (Dil Bayramı), in memory of the first language congress in 1932.
13. A yes–no question gets the little word mi: Geliyor musun? — “Are you coming?” mi follows vowel harmony too.
14. There is no verb “to have”. You say Bir kedim var, literally “my cat exists”.
15. Since 1928 Turkish has been written almost exactly as it is spoken: each letter stands for one sound.
16. Like many languages, Turkish has a familiar and a polite word for “you”: sen and siz.
17. Turkish has no word for “the”. bir (one) often works as “a”: bir ev, “a house”.
18. In the Republic of Cyprus, Greek and Turkish are both official languages.
19. Before a meal people wish Afiyet olsun!, and to someone at work they say Kolay gelsin! — “may it come easy”.
20. Adding endings can produce very long words. Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdan is a favourite joke example.