Turkish Alphabet

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, in the upper case:

    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

and in the lower case:

    a, b, c, ç, d, e, f, g, ğ, h, ı, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, ö, p, r, s, ş, t, u, ü, v, y, z.


This translates to 8 vowels (A, E, I, İ, O, Ö, U, Ü) and 21 consonants.

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.

Like Hungarian, Finnish, and all Turkic languages, the Turkish language makes use of a concept called vowel harmony. The vowels in most, if not all Turkish grammatical constructs are selected depending on the type of vowel that precedes the construct. There are three distinctions that classify Turkish vowels. First they are either rounded or unrounded, reflecting the shape of the lips when speaking them. Second, vowels may be closed or open, depending on the position of the mouth. Finally, they may be classified as back or front vowels, based on the placement of the sound in the mouth. The vowel classifications are summarized below.

 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.

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 Ataturk.

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 [Yazım Kılavuzu].) 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; the 1982 Constitution explicitly retains this law. In practice, the requirement of using the Turkish alphabet in state registers has made it impossible to register some Kurdish names exactly as they are rendered in Kurdish orthography, which includes q, w, and x. The families can give their children Kurdish names, but these names cannot 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, depending on the country of residence.