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Turkish linguistic data
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Common questions about Turkish
What linguistic data does this Turkish page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system (with vowel harmony), morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Turkish's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Turkish data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What is vowel harmony in Turkish?
Suffix vowels assimilate to the last vowel of the stem along two dimensions: front/back (e/a, i/ı, ö/o, ü/u) and rounded/unrounded. ev-ler-im-iz-de 'in our houses' uses front unrounded harmony throughout; oda-lar-ımız-da 'in our rooms' uses back unrounded. A single suffix has 2-4 surface forms picked by the rules.
How does Turkish mark evidentiality?
Past tense splits into two morphemes by source of information: -dI (definite past, witnessed or known directly) versus -mIş (reported, inferred, or surprising). geldi 'he came (I saw it)' versus gelmiş 'he came (apparently / I heard)'. The choice is grammatically obligatory, not optional.
Why does Turkish show a high typological similarity score with Japanese or Korean?
All three share SOV word order, agglutinative morphology, postpositions/case suffixes, and no grammatical gender. They're not in the same family, and the genetic component of the similarity score weighs against pairing them, but the typology component lifts the score considerably. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Turkish
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Göksel, Aslı & Kerslake, Celia (2005). "Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar." Routledge. — Person markers (Group 1 and Group 2): pp. 82–83 (§8.4). — Case suffixes (5-way -(y)I, -(y)A, -DA, -DAn, -(n)In/Im): pp. 67–68 (§8.1.3). — Possessive suffixes (4-way harmonic): pp. 66–67 (§8.1.2). — Perfective -DI has 8 surface forms (-dı/-di/-du/-dü/-tı/-ti/-tu/-tü): p. 44 (§6.1). — Imperfective -(I)yor and its interaction with negation (-mA + -(I)yor → -mIyor): pp. 77–78 (§8.2.3.3). — ben/sen → bana/sana before dative -(y)A (irregular pronoun stem): p. 46 (§6.1.3).
- Kornfilt, Jaklin (1997). "Turkish." London: Routledge (Descriptive Grammars series).
- Lewis, G. L. (2000). "Turkish Grammar." 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.