Basics of Turkish Grammar

Sunset on the Bosphorus in İstanbul, looking from the Asian shore across to the Sultanahmet district with the Ayasofya (Haghia Sofia) and Sultanahmet Cami (Blue Mosque). See my travel pages for many pictures of Turkey.

Welcome to a look at the basics of Turkish grammar!

This is something I put together for my own use, to serve as a study guide and reasonably complete and organized refresher or review material.

The best book is Geoffrey L. Lewis' excellent Turkish Grammar. My attempt in these pages is to put together a heavily compressed summary of his textbook.

Turkish is a very challenging language for a native speaker of English or other Indo-European languages. Turkish is completely different.

As Steve Martin observed of the French, "They have a different word for everything!" It's the same with Turkish, except even more so. Much of English, after all, is based on Norman era French, and much of the rest shares the same ancestry as German, Old Norse, and so on. Even Russian is an Indo-European language, so once you get past its alphabet you find similar words. See how similar Indo-European words can be, but look at how different the Turkish equivalents are.

It's not just the semantics or individual words that are very different in Turkish, the syntax or how words are assembled into sentences is also radically different from that of English. You the verb at the end will find.

Let's get to the details. It probably makes the most sense to look at these pages in the following order:

1. Start with the background and introduction, where you will find a list of recommended reference texts.
2. Then look at the overall word order, see the characters unique to Turkish, and see the concept of vowel harmony and variable vowels. I also show you how to render those special Turkish characters in HTML and latex.
3. Moving into words, let's start with the things, the pronouns and nouns. Turkish has a very different way of expressing possession. Then it's easy to add the adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
4. Turkish Verbs are the subject of the biggest page by far. Turkish verbs can get very complex because it is an agglutinative language — a whole series of suffixes and similar can be added to construct an entire sentence in one large word.
5. Once we have all the pieces, we can look in more detail at word order in Turkish sentences.
6. The spread of the Ottoman Empire led to the inclusion of a lot of Arabic and Persian words. The Turkish Language Reform started in the 1930s and is still continuing, working to return Turkish to its Turkish roots. The Turkish language has changed a great deal in just the past century.
7. Finally, I have assembed an alphabetical list of all suffixes used in Turkish.

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