A short, structured introduction to Türkçe — the language that sits at the centre of the Republic of Türkiye and is read on every road sign you will pass.
Last reviewed on 2 May 2026.
Turkish is the official language of the Republic of Türkiye and the first language of the great majority of the country's roughly 85 million people. It is also widely spoken in Northern Cyprus, parts of Greece and Bulgaria, and across diaspora communities in Western Europe. Outside its homeland it sounds nothing like the languages it borders — and that is the first useful thing to know about it.
Turkish belongs to the Turkic family, not to the Indo-European family that includes Greek, Persian, English and most other languages of Europe and the Middle East. Its closest large relatives are spoken across Central Asia: Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and a long tail of smaller Turkic languages stretching east to Siberia. A speaker of Turkish can usually get the gist of conversational Azerbaijani; the relationship is close enough that the two are sometimes described as mutually intelligible.
For the casual learner, this matters because the grammar will not behave like the European languages you may know. Word order, agreement, and how meaning gets attached to the ends of words all work differently. Vocabulary is also distinctive at the everyday level — words for body parts, family members, basic verbs, and common foods — though you will quickly recognise many borrowings from Arabic, Persian, French and English layered on top.
Turkish is written in a Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 as part of the wider reform programme led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Before that, Ottoman Turkish had been written in a modified Arabic script. The 1928 alphabet has 29 letters and is famously phonetic: each letter corresponds to a single consistent sound. Once you learn how each letter is pronounced, you can read any word out loud reliably, even if you do not know what it means.
Letters that look familiar to English readers but sound different:
c — like English "j" in "jam". cami (mosque) sounds like "JAH-mee".ç — like English "ch". çay = "chai".ş — like English "sh". şehir (city) = "she-HIR".j — like the "s" in "measure". Used mostly in loanwords.y — always a consonant, like English "y" in "yes".Letters that exist in Turkish but not in English:
ı (dotless i) — a short, neutral vowel made at the back of the mouth. Distinct from i.ö — like the German "ö" or French "eu" in peu.ü — like the German "ü" or French "u" in tu.ğ (yumuşak g, "soft g") — usually silent; it lengthens the preceding vowel rather than producing a sound of its own.Letters that exist in English but not in Turkish: q, w, x. They appear only in foreign words and brand names.
Vowels in a Turkish word tend to "agree" with each other. Suffixes adapt their vowels to match the vowels of the word they attach to, so the same grammatical ending can take a few different shapes. The locative suffix meaning "in" appears as -de, -da, -te or -ta depending on the word. Istanbul'da ("in Istanbul"), evde ("at home"). The harmony is what makes spoken Turkish sound smooth and patterned.
Where English uses several short words ("from your houses"), Turkish stacks suffixes onto a single root: ev (house) → evler (houses) → evleriniz (your houses) → evlerinizden (from your houses). The order of suffixes is fixed and predictable. Once you can read individual suffixes, long words decompose neatly.
The default order is subject–object–verb. The verb is at the end of the sentence. Questions are formed with a small particle (mi, mı, mu, mü) rather than by changing word order or adding "do".
There is no gender marking on nouns or pronouns. The single third-person pronoun o covers "he", "she" and "it". This makes some translation problems harder and some easier — Turkish often leaves a person's gender unspecified by default.
| Turkish | English |
|---|---|
| Merhaba | Hello |
| Günaydın | Good morning |
| İyi akşamlar | Good evening |
| Lütfen | Please |
| Teşekkür ederim | Thank you |
| Sağ ol / Sağ olun | Thanks (informal / polite) |
| Rica ederim | You're welcome |
| Evet | Yes |
| Hayır | No |
| Pardon / Affedersiniz | Excuse me |
| Anlamadım | I didn't understand |
| İngilizce biliyor musunuz? | Do you speak English? |
| Ne kadar? | How much? |
| Nerede? | Where? |
| Tuvalet nerede? | Where is the toilet? |
| Hesap, lütfen | The bill, please |
| Afiyet olsun | Bon appétit / enjoy your meal |
| Çay, lütfen | Tea, please |
| Yardım edebilir misiniz? | Can you help me? |
| Hoşça kalın | Goodbye (said by the person leaving) |
| Güle güle | Goodbye (said to the person leaving) |
English has borrowed several everyday words from Turkish: kiosk (from köşk), yogurt (from yoğurt), turban (from tülbent), shish kebab (from şiş kebabı), baklava, meze, raki, and the geographical name Bosphorus, which entered English via Greek but is itself layered with Turkic and Greek elements.
The traffic moves both ways. Modern Turkish has taken in a large vocabulary from French — otel, restoran, asansör, mağaza — and a growing list from English in technology, business and youth culture. Older layers of Arabic and Persian remain in formal, religious and literary registers, although the 20th-century language reform reduced their everyday share considerably.