Language

Turkish is a difficult language to master for foreigners, not only because it’s hard to pronounce, but because word order is different to English (the verb almost always found at the end of the sentence), and because it’s an agglutinative language, where words are formed mostly by linking affixes one after the other to create new words. Affixes usually indicate the grammatical function of the word, and many of them can be linked together—and create very long words! Here is an extreme example: You can say “You are apparently one of those we were unable to convert into a Czech” in one word in Turkish: “Cekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz.” This is a more humorous example, obviously, but long words are not an infrequent occurrence in regular spoken Turkish: “Gidebileceklermis” for instance means “It seems they will be able to go.”

The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters and is based on the Latin alphabet; while most of these letters overlap with those in English, Q, W and X are not used and there are additional letters: Ç, Ğ, I, Ö, Ş and Ü. (You may or may not see this characters properly on your screen – see the setup of your browser) Turkish words are pronounced as they are spelt, but to pronounce them correctly you need to know how each letter is pronounced. Here is a list that shows you how: