ABC: The Turkish Alphabet

I'm happy to be able to write this post as it means I've successfully mastered all the sounds in the Turkish alphabet! This post may be dull for non-linguistically-inclined people, so feel free to check out 5 Reasons You'll Love Ankara or Turkish Vices instead.

The Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters: 22 consonants & 7 vowels. It uses all the same characters as the English alphabet but excludes Q, W & X. Since the two alphabets are so similar, I've only included special characters and pronunciations: 

• Cc - "j" like "joy"
• Çç - "ch" like "change"
• Ğğ - silent letter
• Iı - pronounced as "euh" like the "e" in "open"
• İi - same as "i" in English but worth mentioning for how the uppercase character is displayed
• Öö - "oa" like "goat"
• Şş - "sh" like "sheer"
• Üü - pronounced as "ouh" like the "e" in "new" 

In Turkish there is a general rule that each vowel must be separated by a consonant (e.g. s-e-l-a-m, v-o-w-e-l) but there are some exceptions (e.g. s-a-a-t, b-o-o-k). Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning that stem words remain the same while suffixes change to indicate possession. Here's a couple examples:

• English: "I have a cat" is structured as pronoun-verb-object
• Turkish: "I have a cat" is "Kedim var" and structured as subject-noun-verb. "Kedi" means "cat", the "-im" suffix makes it 1st person possessive, and "var" means "have"
• English: "You have a cat" is again structured as pronoun-verb-object
• Turkish: "You have a cat" is "Kedin var" with the "-in" suffix making it 2nd person possessive

If you already speak an agglutinative language (e.g. Korean, Japanese, Farsi) then learning Turkish will be easier as you're already familiar with the sentence structure. Turkish may be a challenging language but it's well worth the investment of learning!