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The genitive marks the possessor — "the house's", "of the book", "Ali's" — and its ending harmonises four ways.

What the genitive does

The genitive turns a noun into a possessor. Put it on ev "house" and you get evin, "of the house" or "the house's"; put it on the name Ali and you get Ali'nin, "Ali's". One ending carries the whole meaning, and its vowel is set by harmony.

English says the same thing two ways — "the book's cover" and "the cover of the book" — and Turkish uses this single ending for both. The ending always lands on the owner, never on the thing that is owned.

Vowel harmony picks the ending

It is one suffix in eight written shapes — four after a consonant, four after a vowel. After a consonant the ending attaches straight to the stem, its vowel chosen four ways by harmony: evin, günün. After a vowel a buffer -n- slides in first, so araba becomes arabanın.

The suffix vowel copies the stem's last vowel on two counts at once — front or back, and rounded or flat — which is what gives four vowels rather than two. Say okulun and then günün out loud and you can hear the rounding pull the ending to -un and -ün.

Stems ending in a consonant

Each of these stems ends in a consonant, so the ending attaches with nothing in between. The one spelling change happens inside the stem: kitap softens its final p to b before the vowel of the ending, giving kitabın.

Stems ending in a vowel

When the stem ends in a vowel, the buffer -n- keeps the two vowels apart: araba gives arabanın, and the buffer-less arabaın is not a word. On a proper name the ending is written after an apostrophe, which leaves the name itself intact: Ali'nin, Türkiye'nin.

Of the house, or your house?

After a consonant the genitive ending and the second-person possessive ending are spelled alike, so evin reads two ways: the possessor "of the house", or the owned "your house". The sentence around it decides. Spelling the pronoun out — senin evin, "your house" — forces the second reading; standing alone, evin is taken as the genitive.

The possessor is only half the phrase

A possessor rarely stands alone. It heads a phrase whose second half — the thing owned — carries an ending of its own: Ali'nin "Ali's" joins evi "his house" to make Ali'nin evi, "Ali's house". This topic covers the first half, the genitive on the owner; the ending on the second word is the possessive-compound topic.

Asking whose

To ask who the owner is, Turkish uses kimin, "whose" — itself the genitive of the word for "who". The answer comes back in the genitive too: ask kimin and the reply is a possessor like Ali'nin, benim or senin.

The pronoun forms

The personal pronouns have their own small set of genitives. Most are regular — senin, sizin, onların, and onun, where o takes the buffer -n-. Two are irregular: ben and biz end in -im instead of the -in you would predict, giving benim and bizim; the tidy-looking benin is not a word.

One noun takes a different buffer

One vowel-final noun refuses the regular buffer. Where araba takes -n- to give arabanın, the noun su "water" reaches instead for -y-, giving suyun. The regular-looking sunun is not used.