Turkish: what sets it apart, and how long it takes

Agglutination taken to its conclusion, plus a mood that marks whether you saw a thing yourself or only heard about it.

FamilyTurkic › Turkish

ScriptLatin

Speakers90M 84M native · 6M second

Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.

The first hundred words cover34.6% and the first thousand 62.3%

What sets it apart

Endings stack until a single word carries what English needs a sentence for, and the order of the endings is fixed and logical.
Vowels come in teams, and every ending shifts to match the last vowel of the stem. Once the pattern clicks it is close to automatic.
It marks evidentiality: -miş on the verb says you did not witness this, you were told. You have to choose every time.
The alphabet was switched from Arabic script to Latin in 1928, and the changeover was pushed through in a matter of months.
No grammatical gender, one pronoun for he and she, and no articles.
Turkish blames no language. It says Fransız kaldım, I was left French, meaning I have no idea what is going on: the confusion is a state you fall into, not a language someone else is speaking.

What it opens

Suffixes stack until one word carries a sentence: evlerinizden, from your houses. Perfectly regular vowel harmony makes it click like a combination lock. Istanbul straddles two continents, the series conquer world television, and Turkish hospitality upgrades to legendary the moment you attempt it.

Words with no translation

yakamoz

YAH-kah-moz

The reflection of the moon on water

Turkish also uses it for the glow plankton makes in the sea at night: one word for two ways water can hold light.
Three languages on this page bothered to name the moon on the water, and none of them named it the same way. Turkish has this, and gümüşservi for the shape it makes. Swedish has mångata, and calls it a road.

gümüşservi

gu-MUSH-ser-vee

Moonlight on water, seen as a tall silver tree lying on the sea

silver cypress

Turkish has two words for the same light.
Yakamoz is what you see. Gümüşservi is what it looks like: a cypress, in silver, laid flat on the water.
One names the thing, the other draws it. The Swedish mångata, further up this page, walks on it instead.

hüzün

hoo-ZOON

A collective melancholy shared by a whole city.

The Turkish melancholy Pamuk wrote a whole book about: not private sadness but a shared, almost noble gloom that hangs over Istanbul like haze on the Bosphorus, binding its people together.

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Turkish parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Turkish vs Kazakh →

Where to practise it

Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Turkish with.

The Turkish Passepartout is not out yet

Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.

Leaving takes one click.

Stories in Turkish

Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.

Turkish in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →