Everything about The Turkish Alphabet totally explained
The
Turkish alphabet is a variant of the
Latin alphabet used for writing the
Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, a certain number of which (
Ç,
Ğ,
I, İ,
Ö,
Ş, and
Ü) have been adapted or modified for the phonetic requirements of the language.
These letters are:
»
Of these 29 letters, 8 are vowels (
A,
E,
I, İ,
O,
Ö,
U,
Ü); the 21 others are consonants.
The letters
Q,
W, and
X of the
English alphabet don't occur in the Turkish alphabet.
Names
The names of the vowel letters are the vowels themselves, while the names of the consonant letters are the consonant plus
e or (for two letters only) "a." The one exception is
ğ "yumuşak ge":
a, be, ce, çe, de, e, fe, ge, yumuşak ge, ha, ı, i, je, ka, le, me, ne, o, ö, pe, re, se, şe, te, u, ü, ve, ye, ze.
Sounds
Turkish orthography is highly
phonetic and a word's pronunciation is always completely identified by its spelling. The following table presents the Turkish letters, the sounds they correspond to in
International Phonetic Alphabet and how these can be approximated more or less by an
English speaker.
| Letter |
|
English
approximation |
Letter |
|
English
approximation |
| A |
a |
/a/ |
As a in father |
M |
m |
|
As m in man |
| B |
b |
/b/ |
As b in bat |
N |
n |
/n/ |
As n in nay |
| C |
c |
/dʒ/ |
As j in job |
O |
o |
/o/ |
As o in no |
| Ç |
ç |
/tʃ/ |
As ch in chat |
Ö |
ö |
/œ/ |
No English equivalent |
| D |
d |
/d/ |
As d in dog |
P |
p |
/p/ |
As p in put |
| E |
e |
/e/ |
As e in red |
R |
r |
/ɾ/ |
No English equivalent (Tapped r) |
| F |
f |
/f/ |
As f in far |
S |
s |
/s/ |
As s in sand |
| G |
g |
/g/ or /ɟ/ |
As g in gap |
Ş |
ş |
/ʃ/ |
As sh in she |
| Ğ |
ğ |
|
No English equivalent |
T |
t |
/t/ |
As t in top |
| H |
h |
/h/ |
As h in hot |
U |
u |
/u/ |
As oo in pool |
| I |
ı |
/ɯ/ |
No English equivalent |
Ü |
ü |
/y/ |
No English equivalent |
| İ |
i |
/i/ |
As ee in feet |
V |
v |
/v/ |
As v in valve |
| J |
j |
/ʒ/ |
As g in montage |
Y |
y |
/j/ |
As y in you |
| K |
k |
/k/ or /c/ |
As c in cat |
Z |
z |
/z/ |
As z in zip |
| L |
l |
/ɫ/ or /l/ |
As l in let |
- The occurrence of [ɣ] is dialectal; for speakers who don't pronounce it as a voiced velar fricative, it may instead appear as the lengthening of the preceding vowel.
History
Early history
The earliest known Turkish alphabet is the
Orkhon script. In general,
Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets including
Cyrillic,
Arabic,
Greek,
Armenian,
Latin and some other Asiatic writing systems.
Turkish was written using the Arabic script during the Ottoman era. However, Latin was applied to the Turkish language for educational purposes even before the 20th century reform. Instances include a 1635 Latin-Albanian dictionary
Frang Bardhi, who also incorporated several saying in the Turkish language, as an appendix to his work (for example ‘Alma agatsdan irak duschamas’ – An apple doesn't fall far from its tree.)
Modern Turkish alphabet
The current 29-letter
Turkish alphabet, used for the
Turkish language, was established by the
Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet, numbered 1353, in
Turkey on
November 1,
1928, as a vital step in the cultural part of
Atatürk's Reforms. Replacing the earlier
Ottoman Turkish script, the script was created as an extended version of the
Latin alphabet at the initiative of
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
The alphabet reform, combined later with the foundation of
Turkish Language Association in 1932, campaigns by the Ministry of Education including the opening of
Public Education Centers throughout the country, and the active encouragement of people by
Atatürk with many trips to the countryside often involving him teaching the new alphabet, succeeded in achieving a substantial increase in the literacy rate of the population from a figure around 20% to over 90%. The reforms were also backed up by the
Law on Copyrights, issued in 1934, encouraging and strengthening the private publishing sector. In 1939,
The First Turkish Publications Congress was organized in
Ankara, for discussing the issues like copyright, printing, the progress on improving the literacy rate and scientific publications, with the attendance of 186 deputies.
The work of preparing the new alphabet based on the Latin letters and incorporating necessary modifications to account for sounds specific to Turkish language, was undertaken by the
Language Commission (Dil Encümeni) consisting of the following members:
» Linguists
Ragıp Hulûsi Özdem,
» Ahmet Cevat Emre,
İbrahim Grandi Grantay,
» Educators
Mehmet Emin Erişirgil,
» İhsan Sungu,
Fazıl Ahmet Aykaç,
» Writers and members of parliament
Falih Rıfkı Atay,
» Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın,
Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu.
The commission started the work on the new alphabet on
June 26,
1928. The letter
Ö was adopted from the
Swedish alphabet by suggestion from the Swedish interpreter of the
Dragoman House (ambassador house) present at the commission for discussing the new alphabet.
Ç was adopted from the
Albanian alphabet,
Ş was from the
S-comma of the
Romanian alphabet, and
Ü is from the
German alphabet.
Distinctive features
Note that
dotted and dotless I are separate letters, each with its own uppercase and lowercase form.
I is the capital form of
ı, and
İ is the capital form of
i. (In the original law establishing the alphabet, the dotted
İ came before the undotted
I; now their places are reversed [
YazımKılavuzu].) The letter
J, however, uses a
tittle in the same way
English does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dotless uppercase version.
Optional
circumflex accents can be used with "â", "î" and "û" to disambiguate words with different meanings but otherwise the same spelling, or to indicate
palatalization of a preceding consonant (for example, while "
kar" /kar/ means "snow", "
kâr" /car/ means "profit"), or long vowels in
loanwords, particularly from
Arabic. These are seen as variants of "a", "i", and "u" and are becoming quite rare in modern usage.
Status of Q, W, X
The Turkish alphabet has no
Q,
W or
X. Instead, these are transliterated into Turkish as
K,
V, and
KS, respectively. The 1928 Law 1353 enforced usage of only the Turkish letters on official documents like birth certificates, marriage documents, and land registers; In practice, the requirement of using the Turkish alphabet in state registers has made it impossible to register some
Kurdish names exactly as they're rendered in
Kurdish orthography, which includes q, w, and x. The families can give their children Kurdish names, but these names can't include these letters and are required to use the aforementioned transliterations. Many Kurds have applied to the courts seeking to change their names to specifically include the letters q, w, and x. A similar situation exists in Europe where many people with Turkish names reside. Many Turkish names include ğ, ü, ş, ı, ö, ç, and İ, some of which are unavailable in local official alphabets.
In popular culture
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, there are several fictional scenes relating to the various committees supposedly assigned in the Soviet Union to create the New Turkish Alphabet for use in Central Asia, one for a different letter, each one advocating their letter at the expense of other alternative transliterations of the sound in question.Further Information
Get more info on 'Turkish Alphabet'.
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