Turkish Letters & Alphabet

The Turkish alphabet runs A B C Ç D E F G Ğ H I İ J K L M N O Ö P R S Ş T U Ü V Y Z: 29 letters, 8 vowels and 21 consonants. Q, W and X are not part of it; foreign names keep them, but Turkish words are respelled, so taxi is taksi and quartz is kuvars. Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü are not accented variants but full letters with their own places in the dictionary: Ç comes after C, Ğ after G, dotless I ı before dotted İ i, Ö after O, Ş after S and Ü after U.

The alphabet was made for Turkish, so each letter writes one sound and a word is read exactly as it is spelled. There are no silent letters and no combinations like English sh or ch; Turkish has a letter for each of those sounds instead, which is why şehir (city) and çocuk (child) need Ş and Ç.

The eight vowels pair up by where they are said: back a ı o u and front e i ö ü. Suffixes change their vowel to match the word, which is called vowel harmony: evler (houses) but kapılar (doors), evi, kapıyı, okulu, gözü for "the house, the door, the school, the eye" as an object. A missing dot or two dots therefore does not just look careless; it turns the ending into the wrong one.

What Ç, Ğ, Ş, Ö, Ü and C sound like

Ç ç is the ch of "church", as in çay (tea) and çok (very). Ş ş is the sh of "ship", as in şeker (sugar) and teşekkürler (thanks). Plain C c is not a k or s sound but the j of "jam": cam (glass), Cuma (Friday). J j, found mostly in loanwords such as jandarma and plaj (beach), is the s of "measure", and Y y is the y of "yes".

Ğ ğ, called yumuşak ge (soft g), is the most unusual letter. It never begins a word and in standard Istanbul speech it has almost no sound of its own: after a vowel it lengthens it, so dağ (mountain) sounds like "daa" and ağaç (tree) like "aaach", and between front vowels it is heard as a light y, as in değil (not). Its capital Ğ turns up only in text written in capitals, such as DAĞ or a name like ERDOĞAN on a sign.

Ö ö and Ü ü are the rounded front vowels of German: göz (eye), gül (rose), üç (three). They separate words from O and U: öl (die) and ol (be), kül (ash) and kul (servant).

The Turkish dotless i: I ı and İ i

Turkish has two different i's. Dotted İ i is the i of "machine": iki (two), İzmir, İstanbul. Dotless I ı is said like an i with the lips spread and the tongue pulled back, close to the vowel in the second syllable of "roses": kız (girl), ılık (lukewarm), Isparta, Iğdır. They are separate vowels that make separate words: kır is the countryside but kir is dirt, kıl is a hair but kil is clay.

Each keeps its own pair, so the capital of i is İ (U+0130) and the small form of I is ı (U+0131). This is the famous "Turkish I problem" in software: a program that uppercases with English rules writes ISTANBUL instead of İSTANBUL and lowercases IĞDIR into "iğdir". Unicode has special casing rules for Turkish and Azerbaijani, which share the two i's, and well-localised programs use them when the language is set to Turkish (tr).

Watch the look-alikes: ı is not the mathematical dotless 𝚤 or Greek iota ι, and Ş and Ç take a cedilla hook underneath, unlike Romanian ș and ț with a comma below. Some fonts draw the Turkish cedilla on Ş like a comma, but the character is still U+015E.

Â, Î, Û and the apostrophe: the marks of Turkish spelling

Turkish spelling also uses a circumflex, the şapka (hat), on a, i and u. It does not make new letters and is not counted in the 29. It marks a long vowel that distinguishes words, as in hâlâ (still) against hala (aunt) and kâr (profit) against kar (snow); it shows that k, g or l before a or u is said soft, as in kâğıt (paper), dükkân (shop) and rüzgâr (wind); and Î marks the adjective ending in words like millî (national). The Turkish Language Association (TDK) keeps these spellings in its dictionary and spelling guide, though in everyday writing many people leave the circumflex out.

The apostrophe is part of grammar: it separates suffixes in forms such as İstanbul'da (in Istanbul), Ankara'ya (to Ankara) and Türkiye'nin (of Türkiye). Both the typewriter ' and the typographic ’ are used. For quotations Turkish uses “ ” with ‘ ’ inside them; the angle quotes « » are an older or alternative style that you may still come across.

How to type Turkish letters on an English keyboard, Mac or phone

The simplest way is to add a Turkish keyboard. Windows and macOS both offer Turkish Q, the QWERTY-based layout most people in Türkiye use, and Turkish F, a layout designed in 1955 around the frequency of Turkish letters, which some professional typists prefer. On iPhone and Android, add Turkish in the keyboard settings; some English phone keyboards also offer ç, ö, ş or ü when you hold down c, o, s or u, though which letters appear depends on the keyboard. To paste a letter right now, click it in the grid above.

On an English Windows keyboard, number-pad Alt codes cover only the letters shared with Western European languages: Ç Alt+0199, ç Alt+0231, Ö Alt+0214, ö Alt+0246, Ü Alt+0220, ü Alt+0252, Â Alt+0194, â Alt+0226. The codes for Ğ, İ, ı and Ş give other letters unless Windows is set to Turkish, so in Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X instead: 011E / 011F for Ğ ğ, 0130 for İ, 0131 for ı, 015E / 015F for Ş ş. On a Mac with the US layout, Option+C gives ç, Option+U then o or u gives ö or ü, and Option+I then a gives â; for ğ, ş and ı switch to Turkish Q.

In HTML, the named entities are Ç ç, Ğ ğ, İ for İ, ı for ı, Ö ö, Ş ş and Ü ü; the numeric forms Ğ ğ (Ğ ğ), İ ı (İ ı) and Ş ş (Ş ş) work everywhere. Mark the page as lang="tr" so that browsers use Turkish casing rules for text transformations.

Where Turkish is written: 1928 to today

Until 1928 Turkish was written in the Ottoman version of the Arabic script, which had too few vowel letters for its eight vowels. On 1 November 1928 the Turkish parliament adopted the new Latin alphabet, and it soon replaced the old script in newspapers, schools and offices. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took it around the country, chalk in hand, earning the name Başöğretmen (head teacher), and the Nation's Schools (Millet Mektepleri) taught millions of adults to read it.

By CLDR estimates about 82 million people speak Turkish, some 78 million of them in Türkiye. It is also an official language of Cyprus, a minority language in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece and Kosovo, and the language of large communities in Western Europe: about 2.1 million speakers in Germany and some 210,000 in the Netherlands by the same estimates. The money you write with it is the Turkish lira ₺, used in Türkiye and in the north of Cyprus, and the euro € in euro-area countries where Turkish communities live.

Turkish is the largest of the Turkic languages, and its neighbours look familiar: Azerbaijani has its own alphabet, which shares every Turkish letter and also writes Ə, Q and X, and Turkmen, Uzbek and Kazakh are related languages with alphabets of their own, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish is spoken in the Balkans. Kurdish, Greek and Bulgarian are the other languages written beside it in the region; each has its own collection on fsymbols.