As I already mentioned in the introduction to this Turkish Language for Tourists post series, Turkish is a phonetic language. This means that, by learning a few basic rules, it’s easy to pronounce the Turkish words correctly.

Turkish Alphabet

In order to create a phonetic language, a few changes were made to the Latin alphabet. The letters Q, W and X were disregarded and six additional letters were added: ç, ğ, ş, ö, ü and ı (undotted i). So, the Turkish alphabet is made up of eight vowels and twenty-one consonants.

Turkish Pronunciation

• Basic rules
  • each letter is pronounced – e.g. your buddy Mehmet is pronounced ‘mehh-met’ and not ‘me-met’.
  • vowels don’t combine to form diphthongs – e.g. eye, boy, and cow in English
  • consonants don’t combine to form other sounds – e.g. th, gh or sh in English
• Pronunciation of special characters
  • c – as the j in joker
  • ç – as the ch in child
  • g – as the g in garlic
  • ğ – this letter is not pronounced but lenghthens the preceding vowel
  • i – a short i, as in sit and tip
  • ı – as the u in butter
  • ö – as the u in fur
  • u – as the oo in book
  • ü – as the e in few
  • ş – as the sh in she

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