Vowel Harmony 1

Vowel harmony is essential to learn in order to speak Turkish well, however at first it is quite hard to understand, so i will try to make this guide as simple to understand as possible!

In Turkish there are 8 vowels. We can split these into 2 groups. These are:

e, i, ö, ü (known as 'front' vowels)

a, ı, o, u (known as 'back' vowels)


It is essential to learn which vowels go into which group. To make this easier, think of them as the 'e dotted group' (which contains 'e' and the 3 vowels with dots), and the 'a undotted group' (which contains the 'a' and the 3 undotted groups).

Many suffixes are also split into two, for example '-den/-dan' (from), '-de/-da' (in/on/at), and '-(y)e/-(y)a' (to). Vowel harmony insures that the correct suffix is used depending on what the last vowel in the word is.

If the last letter is a 'front' vowel, then '-den', '-de', and '-(y)e' would be used.
If the last letter is a 'back' vowel, then '-dan', '-da', and '-(y)a' would be used.



Examples

ev (house)

from the house (evden)

in the house (evde)

to the house (eve)



car (araba)

from the car (arabadan)

in the car (arabada)

to the car (arabaya)

Vowel Harmony 2

You should have already looked at the Vowel Harmony 1 section and you will have seen how the vowels are split into 2 groups, each of which take different suffixes.

However, there are other suffixes that instead of taking either 'e' or 'a', take either 'i, ı, ü, u', such as ...'-(i)yorum' (i am ....ing), '..dim' (i did...), and '-siz' (without). Therefore we need to split the suffixes into more groups in order to add the suffixes with the correct vowels.

For example if the suffix is '-siz' (without) then the 'i' will change into:

If the last vowel is:
'e' or 'i' - stays as 'i' (-siz)
'a' or 'ı' - changes to 'ı' (-sız)
'ü' or 'ö - changes to 'ü' (-süz)
'u' or 'o' - changes to 'u' (-suz)

This applies to a number of suffixes, such as the past suffix ('...dim'), the possessive suffix (-im, -sin etc) and the 'without' suffix (-siz), as well as many more. Click on the suffixes page to       discover more.     


Examples

For now we will just use just two suffixes, the '-siz' suffix, meaning 'without....'. and 'li', meaning 'with...'.

sugar - şeker
without sugar - şekersiz
with sugar - sekerli

milk - süt
without milk - sütsüz
with milk - sütsü

ice - buz
without ice - buzsuz
with ice - buzlu

money -para
without money -parasız
with money - paralı

Consonant Changes