Turkish Language Guide

Official language in
Türkiye, Cyprus
Script
Latin

Where it's spoken

Article 3 of the Constitution of the Republic of Türkiye states that the language of the State is Turkish. Turkish is also one of the two official languages of the Republic of Cyprus: Article 3 of the Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus names Greek and Turkish as the Republic's official languages and requires legislative, executive and administrative acts to be drawn up in both.

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Script & pronunciation

Turkish is written in a Latin alphabet. A description of Turkish phonology lists eight vowels — a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü — and 21 consonants, for a total of 29 letters. Six of these letters — ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü — extend the plain Latin letters with extra marks or shapes, and ı and i, though they look like the same letter with or without a dot, belong to different vowel classes and represent different sounds. Turkish orthography is described as an almost perfectly phonemic transcription, so each letter keeps the same sound wherever it appears. Some of this app's cards mark the syllable breaks of the Turkish spelling with hyphens instead of giving a separate phonetic transcription, as in Reh-ber kö-pe-ği-mi ge-ti-re-bi-lir mi-yim? for Rehber köpeğimi getirebilir miyim? ("Can I bring my service/guide dog?").

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Grammar essentials

Turkish's most common word order in a simple sentence is subject–object–verb. Turkish is also an agglutinative language: words are built by stacking suffixes onto a root, with each suffix staying clearly identifiable inside the resulting word. A suffix's own vowel often changes to match the vowel that comes before it, a process called vowel harmony: back vowels are followed by back vowels and front vowels by front vowels, and — for close (high) vowels — a rounded vowel is followed by a rounded vowel and an unrounded vowel by an unrounded one. The yes/no question suffix is one such suffix: this app's cards show it taking all four of its possible vowels depending on the word it attaches to — Burada asansör var mı? ("Do you have an elevator / lift?"), Sesli rehber mevcut mu? ("Are there audio guides available?"), Denizde yüzmek güvenli mi? ("Is it safe to swim in the sea?"), and Geç check-out mümkün mü? ("Is late checkout possible?"). Negation is formed the same agglutinative way, by adding a suffix directly onto the verb stem before the tense ending, as in Anlamıyorum ("I don't understand"), where anla- ("understand") is followed by a negative suffix and then the tense and first-person endings.

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Politeness & etiquette

Turkish distinguishes two words for "you": sen, and siz, which is also the plural "you" and is the more formal, more distant form. A survey-based paper on Turkish forms of address describes siz as "the more formal and yet distant term," notes that it is the term service staff use with a customer regardless of who that customer is, and explains that a foreigner who addresses a Turk with the more familiar sen instead can inadvertently offend them. This app's own card for Siz likewise advises always using the polite siz with strangers, and sen only with people you already know well: its dating phrases use the familiar sen (Seni seviyorum, "I love you"), while its phrases for public interactions such as asking to take a photo use the polite siz (Sizinle fotoğraf çektirebilir miyim?, "Can I take a photo with you?").

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