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Turkish phrases, by meaning
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Common questions about Turkish
What's covered on this Turkish page?
Twenty-two functional categories with Turkish examples: tense and aspect (the simple present in -ar/-er, the progressive in -iyor, the witnessed past in -di, the reported past in -miş, the future in -ecek), modality (-ebil for ability, lazım/-malı for must, isteme for want), six cases (Nom, Acc -i, Dat -e, Loc -de, Abl -den, Gen -in), negation in -me, the conditional in -se, and 14 others.
How does vowel harmony actually work?
Every suffix has multiple vowel forms; the form chosen matches the harmony class of the root's last vowel. 'In' is -da after a, ı, o, u (back vowels) but -de after e, i, ö, ü (front vowels), and -ta or -te if the root ends in a voiceless consonant. ev-de 'in the house', oda-da 'in the room', kitap-ta 'in the book'. Once you've internalized the four-way (or eight-way for some suffixes) split, suffix choice becomes automatic.
What's the difference between -di and -miş past tenses?
Source of evidence. -di reports past events you witnessed firsthand: gel-di 'he came (I saw him)'. -miş reports events you learned about indirectly — through hearsay, inference, or sudden realization: gel-miş 'he came (so I heard / apparently)'. The distinction is grammaticalized; choosing the wrong one shifts the speaker's relationship to the information. Examples in Tense and Evidentiality contrast the pair.
Why do Turkish words get so long?
Because Turkish is agglutinating: each grammatical piece is a discrete suffix, and a single word can carry several. ev-ler-im-iz-de 'in our houses' = house-PLURAL-1SG.POSS-1PL.POSS-LOC. evlerinizdekilerden 'from those at your houses' is one word. Glosses on the page break each suffix out so you can see exactly what every chunk does.
Is this Standard Istanbul Turkish?
Yes — the prestige variety based on educated Istanbul speech, the form used in broadcasting, education, and writing across Turkey. Anatolian regional varieties differ in pronunciation, some lexicon, and a few grammatical details, and Cypriot Turkish has its own conventions. The structures shown here are the broadly understood standard.
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.