Turkish alphabet
Turkish alphabet is Turkish alphabet, 29 letters. 29 letters: eight vowels, its own ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü — and not a single q, w, x. The characters are grouped: eight vowels instead of five, consonants of their own, familiar letters, foreign sounds. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Eight vowels instead of five
The whole grammar rests on them: an ending bends to the last vowel of the stem (vowel harmony). Back vowels — a, ı, o, u; front vowels — e, i, ö, ü.
Consonants of their own
Three signs Latin does not have: ç, ş and the “soft” ğ, which has no sound of its own. The fourth letter here is c — an ordinary shape, but it reads as the j of jam.
Familiar letters, foreign sounds
They look European and read differently — this is where reading a sign aloud trips.
Read the way they look
Twelve letters with nothing to learn.
What to know about the “Turkish alphabet” script
There are 29 letters. Q, W and X are absent from the Turkish alphabet — k, v and ks do their jobs. The order is alphabetical, but the pair I/ı stands apart: these are two different letters. The capital of i is a dotted İ, and the capital of ı is a dotless I. Computers keep forgetting this, and it is exactly where Turkish text breaks in other people’s software.
Where this script came from and why it looks the way it does
Turkey switched scripts in two months: the law adopting the Latin alphabet passed on 1 November 1928, and from the start of 1929 newspapers and documents were already coming out in it. No language has ever changed its script that fast — and a whole generation found itself unable to read the old books overnight.
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “a as in “father””?
A pure open a, steady as in father
- Which character reads as “ch as in “church””?
The little tail under the letter is the whole difference from c (j): çay is “chay”, tea — not “say”
- Which character reads as “f as in “fun””?
An ordinary f
- Which character reads as “h as in “hat”, but breathier”?
A light breathy h — it is never dropped the way the h of “hour” is
- Which character reads as “zh as in “measure””?
As in measure or vision. Found only in loanwords
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 29 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Turkish alphabet?
29 letters — Turkish alphabet. The characters have capital and small forms.
Can I listen to how the Turkish letters sound?
Yes. 29 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Turkish alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.