The Basics of Turkish Grammar

15 March 2021

The grammatical structure of the Turkish language is a collection of unique characteristics that set it apart from many other languages. Here is a brief overview of Turkish grammar.

Below you can download The Basics of Turkish Grammar.

Word Order

Turkish has a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order, which means that the subject usually comes first, followed by the object, and finally the verb.

For example: “Fatma süt içiyor” (Fatma drinks milk).

Agglutination

Turkish is an agglutinative language, wherein affixes are attached to the root words to express various meanings. This unique feature allows for the formation of complex words within a single word.

Vowel Harmony

Turkish has a vowel harmony system, which means that certain suffixes and particles change their vowels to harmonize with the vowels in the root word. There are two main vowel groups:

“front vowels: e, i, ö, ü” and “back vowels: a, ı, o, u

Cases

Turkish uses suffixes to indicate grammatical cases. In addition to the nominative, there are 5 cases: accusative, dative, locative, ablative, and genitive. Cases are used to show the relationship between words in a sentence. For the cases you can visit: https://ebrusarikaya.com/en/turkish-grammatical-cases/

Absence of the Definite Article

Unlike many other languages, Turkish does not have a definite article (like “the” in English) to indicate the specificity of a noun. However, the accusative case is used for this purpose.

Order of Adjectives

In Turkish grammar, adjectives precede the nouns they describe. For example:

“Delicious food” is translated as “lezzetli yemek” where “lezzetli” means “delicious” and “yemek” means “food.”

“Red car” is translated as “kırmızı araba” where “kırmızı” means “red” and “araba” means “car.”

These are just a few of the distinctive features of Turkish grammar synthesis. The Turkish language offers many other nuances and rules, and by downloading the chart below, you can find more grammatical information about the Turkish language.

The chart is useful both for students of the Turkish language and for teachers.

Click below to download the free material.

For a linguistic consultation, you can visit: https://ebrusarikaya.com/en/lessons/