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The future participle names a noun by an action still to come — the book you will read, the work to be done — and it carries a possessive when the noun is not the one acting.

What this participle names

This participle hangs a verb in front of a noun and turns the pair into a description, the way English leans on a relative clause. okuyacağım kitap is 'the book I will read'; gelecek hafta is 'the coming week'. Whatever it names has not happened yet — the action is still ahead.

Who does the action is shown by a possessive ending on the participle. When the noun is itself the doer, the participle stands bare: gelecek hafta, the week that is coming. When the noun is something the action falls on — a book that gets read, a house that gets bought — the participle takes a possessive that agrees with the real doer: okuyacağım kitap, the book I will read; alacağı ev, the house she will buy.

Two shapes: front and back

The ending harmonises two ways with the last vowel of the stem. A front-vowel stem takes -ecek; a back-vowel stem takes -acak. Rounding plays no part here, so all four front vowels behave alike and all four back vowels behave alike — two shapes, not four.

When the stem already ends in a vowel, a buffer -y- slides in so the two vowels never collide. That buffered ending is the third column above: -yecek and -yacak are simply -ecek and -acak with the glide in front. So izlemek builds a form on -yecek and okumak one on -yacak.

The final consonant softens

A bare participle ends in a hard -k: gelecek, yapılacak. Add a possessive vowel and that -k voices — the ending -ecek becomes -eceğ, and -acak becomes -acağ — so the first-person form comes out -eceğim and -acağım.

The softening fires only when a possessive vowel follows. A participle that describes its own subject keeps the hard -k untouched: gelecek hafta, yapılacak iş.

Four worked forms

Each phrase below names its noun by something still to happen to it, and each participle carries a possessive pointing back to the doer. Read every one as a compact relative clause.

When the noun acts, and when it does not

The possessive is what tells you who acts. A bare participle describes its own subject — the noun is the one doing the action. A participle with a possessive describes something else, and the possessive names the doer standing behind it.

• gelecek hafta — 'the coming week'. The week is what comes, so the participle stays bare.
• okuyacağım kitap — 'the book I will read'. The book is read, not the reader, so a possessive marks the doer, I.

Still to come versus already done

Turkish splits a relative clause by time. This participle points forward, to something not yet real: okuyacağım kitap, 'the book I will read'. Its realised partner, the participle in -DIK, points back to something already true: okuduğum kitap, 'the book I read'. Same noun, same possessive, two tenses.

• okuyacağım kitap — the reading is still ahead.
• okuduğum kitap — the reading is already done.

Set phrases: time ahead and things to do

The bare participle of gelmek has hardened into an everyday time word. On its own gelecek means 'next' or 'coming': gelecek hafta is 'next week', gelecek ay 'next month', gelecek yıl 'next year'.

The passive participle yapılacak means 'to be done'. Turned into a noun it names a task, and its plural gives the everyday yapılacaklar listesi, a 'to-do list' — literally the list of things to be done.

A few of these participles have frozen into plain nouns you will meet on any menu: içecek, 'a drink', and yiyecek, 'food' — each once 'something that will be drunk' or 'eaten', now just the thing itself.

A common slip: keeping the hard k

The one step learners drop is this softening. Because the bare participle ends in a hard -k, it is tempting to leave it there and write okuyacakım or alacakı. Both are wrong. Once a possessive vowel follows, the -k has to voice, and the forms Turkish accepts are okuyacağım kitap and alacağı ev.