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The dative marks direction and goal — motion 'to' or 'toward' a place or person — and it harmonises two ways with the last vowel of the word it attaches to.

What the dative does

Turkish has no separate word for "to". A suffix does the same work, glued straight onto the noun: eve is "(to) home" and okula is "to school". One suffix, and which of its spellings you use depends only on the noun's last vowel.

The same ending marks the indirect object — the person or thing an action is aimed at: whom you give something, whom you speak to, what you point at. Wherever English reaches for "to" or "toward", Turkish reaches for this one ending.

Vowel harmony picks the ending

The suffix vowel copies the front or back quality of the noun's last vowel. Front vowels — e, i, ö, ü — take -e, so ev becomes eve. Back vowels — a, o, u, and dotless ı — take -a, so okul becomes okula.

Only the front/back split of the last vowel counts here; whether the vowel is rounded plays no part. That is why the dative has two vowel shapes rather than four — -e after a front vowel and -a after a back one.

A buffer and consonant softening

When the word already ends in a vowel, a buffer -y- slides in so the two vowels never meet: araba becomes arabaya and kapı becomes kapıya. That buffered ending is the third column of the table above — -ye and -ya are simply -e and -a with the glide in front. Drop it and you land on the wrong arabaa, which no one says.

A word ending in p, ç, t or k softens that final consonant before the ending, because the suffix opens with a vowel: the p of kitap turns to b, giving kitaba. Forget the softening and you write the wrong kitapa.

Five worked forms

Each of these names a destination or goal — read every one as the answer to the question "where to?"

Motion versus location

It helps to hold the dative apart from the locative, the case of being somewhere. The dative is motion toward — eve, "to the house"; the locative is rest in a place — evde, "at the house". One answers "where to?", the other "where?". English separates them with "to" against "at"; Turkish separates them with the ending.

• eve — "to the house". Motion toward a goal, marked by the dative.
• evde — "at the house". Rest in a place, marked by the locative.

Direction and destination

The core use is physical motion toward something. Aim eve or okula at a verb of movement and it becomes the destination: eve gitmek is "to go home" and okula gitmek is "to go to school". The ending on the noun is what carries the English "to".

Verbs that take the dative

A set of Turkish verbs steer their object into the dative even where the English verb takes a plain object. bakmak is "to look at", and the thing looked at stands in the dative: sana bakmak is "to look at you". başlamak, "to begin", works the same way: okula başlamak is "to start school". Here the ending is not translating "to" at all — it is the case the verb calls for, so these verbs are worth learning together with the dative they govern.

Proper nouns take an apostrophe

On a proper noun the dative is written after an apostrophe, which keeps the name intact: Ali'ye is "to Ali". The apostrophe changes only the spelling — harmony still picks the vowel from the name's last vowel, and the buffer still appears after a final vowel, exactly as in any other word.

Irregular pronoun forms

The pronouns ben ("I") and sen ("you") break the pattern. Their datives are not the regular forms you would expect but bana "to me" and sana "to you" — the stem itself shifts, ben to ban- and sen to san-, before the ending goes on. These two are worth memorising as fixed forms.