The Turkish Suffix System Explained: Vowel Harmony, Suffix Order and the Exceptions

What does agglutination mean in Turkish?

Turkish is an agglutinative language. A word is a root followed by suffixes, and each suffix adds a piece of meaning at the end. English spreads in my houses over three words. Turkish says it in one, evlerimde, and you can still see where each piece begins.

Take ev, house. Add the plural -ler and you get evler, houses. Add -im for evlerim, my houses, and the locative -de for evlerimde, in my houses. Then add -ki, which turns a place into a description: evlerimdeki kitaplar are the books in my houses.

In this chain the root stays unchanged at the front, so a long word is easier to read than it looks. Find the root, then read the suffixes left to right.

Two things make the picture less tidy, and most of this article is about them. Suffixes change shape to fit the word they join, and a few suffixes share a shape with another suffix.

Build a word yourself

The builder below is the one on Dilsever’s home page. Tap the four pieces in order and watch ev grow into evlerimdeki, with the meaning rewritten under each step.

Every vowel in this chain is a front vowel, so every suffix takes e or i. Put the same four suffixes on oda, room, and you get odalarımdaki. The suffixes are the same; only their vowels changed.

Notice that ki stayed ki in both words. That is one of the exceptions covered further down.

The eight vowels, and how grammars write a suffix

Vowel harmony runs on two properties of the eight Turkish vowels. A vowel is front or back, depending on where the tongue sits, and rounded or unrounded, depending on the lips.

Grammars write a suffix with capital letters for the parts that change. This article follows Göksel and Kerslake’s Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. There A stands for e or a, I for ı, i, u or ü, D for d or t, and C for c or ç.

A letter in brackets appears only in some positions: a bracketed consonant after a vowel, a bracketed vowel after a consonant. So the plural is -lAr, the locative -DA and the accusative -(y)I.

Two-way harmony: e or a

A suffix whose vowel is A has two forms. After a front vowel (e, i, ö, ü) it takes e. After a back vowel (a, ı, o, u) it takes a. Rounding plays no part, so okul takes okullar.

The vowel that decides is the last vowel before the suffix. In a chain that is the vowel of the previous suffix, so the choice made on the root carries down the chain: evlerimde, okullarımda.

The table uses okul (school) for the back column and ev (house) for the front one. The two verb rows use yap- (do) and gel- (come).

Four-way harmony: ı, i, u or ü

A suffix whose vowel is I has four forms. Its vowel copies both properties of the vowel before it: front or back, and rounded or unrounded.

In practice that means four pairs. After a or ı the suffix takes ı; after e or i, it takes i. After o or u it takes u; after ö or ü, it takes ü.

The accusative, the genitive and the past tense -DI follow this pattern. So do the endings for my, your and his or her, and the question particle mI. The table uses kız (girl), ev (house), okul (school) and göz (eye), with the verbs al- (take), gel- (come), bul- (find) and gör- (see).

In the accusative, a word that ends in a vowel adds y: araba gives arabayı, köprü gives köprüyü.

Buffer letters: y, s, n and ş

Turkish avoids two vowels meeting at a suffix boundary. When a suffix that starts with a vowel joins a word that ends in one, a consonant slides in between. Most use y: masa gives masaya (to the table) and masayı (the table, as object).

Two common suffixes use their own letter. His or her, -(s)I, uses s: arabası, his or her car. The genitive, -(n)In, uses n: arabanın, as in arabanın kapısı, the door of the car. A third, less common one, the distributive -(ş)Ar, uses ş: ikişer (two each). After a consonant none of these letters appear: evi, evin.

One more n is easy to miss. After his or her, a case ending takes an n first: arabasında (in his car), arabasını (his car, as object), arabasına (to his car).

Consonant changes at the join

Consonants change at the join too, in two ways. The first change belongs to the suffix. A suffix that starts with D begins with t after a voiceless consonant: ç, f, h, k, p, s, ş or t. A common memory aid is the phrase fıstıkçı şahap, which contains all eight.

So ev takes evde but kitap takes kitapta, and gel- gives geldi but git- gives gitti. Suffixes that start with C do the same with c and ç. The suffix for a trade gives işçi (worker), and the suffix for a language gives Türkçe.

The second change belongs to the root. Many words ending in k, p, ç or t soften when a suffix starting with a vowel follows. Final k becomes ğ (çocuk, çocuğu), or g after n (renk, rengi). Final p becomes b (kitap, kitabı), ç becomes c (ağaç, ağacı) and t becomes d (kanat, kanadı). Two common verbs do it too: git- gives gidiyor and et- gives ediyor.

This second change is not automatic. Words of two or more syllables ending in k usually soften. Many one-syllable words keep their consonant (top, topu; süt, sütü), but many others soften (uç, ucu; kap, kabı; gök, göğü). Some longer words keep it too: devlet, devleti.

The TDK Güncel Türkçe Sözlük marks each word that softens with its suffixed ending, as in kitap, -bı. It is a quick check for a new word.

In what order do Turkish noun suffixes go?

Suffixes on a noun come in a fixed order: plural, then possessive, then case. The plural sits next to the root and the case ending comes last. Any slot can be empty.

The rows below fill the slots in different ways. In kitabında the p of kitap softens before the possessive, and the case ending takes the buffer n that follows his or her.

After the case a noun can take more. -ki makes it a description, as in evlerimdeki. A personal ending makes it a predicate: evdeyim, I am at home.

In what order do Turkish verb suffixes go?

A verb has more slots and the same principle. After the stem come voice (passive, causative or reciprocal), then negation, then tense or mood, then the person ending.

The stems here are yaz- (write), yap- (do) and gör- (see), which with the reciprocal becomes görüş- (meet). The third person singular has no ending, which is why yazılmadı stops at the tense. In görüşmeyeceğiz the k of the future softens to ğ before -iz, the same change as in çocuğu.

A second tense suffix can follow the first, and the person ending then moves after it: geliyordum, I was coming.

The question particle mI is written as a separate word but harmonizes like a suffix. Its place depends on the tense. With the -DI past it follows the person ending (geldin mi?); with -(I)yor it comes before it (geliyor musun?).

Suffixes that do not harmonize

Harmony covers most suffixes, but not all of them. Göksel and Kerslake list a small set that keep some or all of their vowels whatever comes before. These are the ones a learner meets first.

The present continuous -(I)yor harmonizes in its first vowel only. The yor never changes, so geliyor, alıyor and görüyor all end the same way. Suffixes after it follow its o, so the front verb gel- still gives geliyorum.

-ken (while, when) never changes: gelirken, yazarken, çocukken. -ki never changes either (evdeki, okuldaki, yarınki), except in a few words such as bugünkü and dünkü.

The old suffix -leyin survives in a few time words and stays fixed too: sabahleyin (in the morning), geceleyin (at night). The ability suffix -(y)Abil harmonizes its first vowel and keeps bil: yapabilir, gelebilir.

Loanwords that take front suffixes

A second group of exceptions sits in the root. Some loanwords whose last vowel is back take front suffixes. saat (hour) gives saati and saatler, kontrol (check) gives kontrolü, harf (letter) gives harfi, and kalp (heart) gives kalbi.

TDK’s Güncel Türkçe Sözlük gives the source language of each: saat, harf and kalp come from Arabic, kontrol from French. The spelling gives no warning of the front suffixes, but the dictionary entry does: it lists saat, -ti and kontrol, -lü.

Rounding still comes from the written vowel, which is why kontrol takes ü rather than i. Dilsever’s Suffix Lab keeps a list of these words (saat, harf, kalp, rol, gol, kontrol and others). Its drills write saati, and its explanation names the word as irregular.

One form, two meanings

Suffixes can share a shape. The clearest case is the accusative -(y)I and his or her, -(s)I. After a vowel they differ: arabayı is the car as object, and arabası is his car. After a consonant both are just -I, so evi can mean either.

The sentence decides. Evi gördüm means I saw the house; Onun evi büyük means his house is big. When a possessed word is also the object, both suffixes appear with the buffer n between them: evini gördüm, I saw his house.

The same happens with other endings, and the table lists common overlaps. Knowing the order of the slots lets you list the readings; the sentence picks one.

Practising the joins

Reading about harmony is the easy part. Producing saati or kitabında without stopping to think takes practice on many words, one suffix at a time.

Dilsever’s Suffix Lab covers 59 suffix families from A1 to B2. Its builder stacks suffixes on a root you type and explains each form, loanword exceptions included. It changes the stem where Turkish does: kitap gives kitabı and şehir gives şehrimiz.

Drills are scheduled per suffix, not per word, with spaced repetition. The mastery check has eight items on words from the app’s library, and seven correct answers pass it.