Turkish suffixes: the full list, with vowel harmony

What a suffix is in Turkish

A Turkish suffix (ek) is an ending added to a word stem that adds one piece of meaning or grammar: plural, possession, a case such as “in” or “from”, a tense, a person, or a new word built from the old one. Turkish adds them in a chain with no spaces, which is why one long word can translate a whole English sentence.

Suffixes fall into two kinds. Inflectional suffixes (plural, possessive, case, tense, person) are grammar and are used on almost every word. Derivational suffixes (-lI, -sIz, -lIk, -CI) build a new word, such as yaşlı “old, aged” from yaş “age”. The tables below separate them by job.

Every suffix on this page is named the way the Ekle app names it, so a label you read here is the label you see when you look a word up.

Turkish vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is the rule that the vowel of a suffix is chosen to match the last vowel of the word before it. Turkish has eight vowels: a e ı i o ö u ü. Suffix vowels follow one of two patterns.

Two-way harmony (A = a or e). After a back vowel (a ı o u) the suffix has a; after a front vowel (e i ö ü) it has e. So kitap-lar but ev-ler.

Four-way harmony (I = ı, i, u or ü). The suffix vowel agrees in frontness and in rounding: ı after a ı, i after e i, u after o u, ü after ö ü. So kız-ım, ev-im, okul-um, göz-üm.

The capital-letter notation. Suffixes are written with capital letters for the sounds that change: A = a/e, I = ı/i/u/ü, D = d/t, C = c/ç, K = k/ğ. Letters in brackets are buffers that appear only when needed. Hence -DA covers da, de, ta, te, and -(y)I is the accusative with a buffer y.

Harmony has exceptions. Many loanwords keep a front suffix after a back vowel, as in saat-ler “hours”, and a few suffixes never change their vowel, such as the -yor of the present continuous and -(y)ken “while”.

The order of Turkish suffixes

Suffixes never swap places. Read left to right:

Noun suffixes: plural, possessive, -ki

Turkish has six possessive suffixes, one per person: -(I)m my, -(I)n your, -(s)I his/her/its, -(I)mIz our, -(I)nIz your (plural), -lArI their. They come after the plural and before the case.

Case suffixes

Turkish has six cases. The nominative is the bare stem; the accusative, dative, locative, ablative and genitive each add a suffix. The instrumental -(y)lA “with” and the equative -cA “like, as” are usually listed alongside them.

Verb suffixes: negation, question, voice, ability

These sit between the verb stem and the tense: voice, ability and negation, plus the copula -DIr and the question particle.

Tense and mood suffixes

One tense or mood suffix goes after the stem, voice, ability and negation. Person endings follow it.

Person endings on verbs

Turkish verbs end with the person. After the past tense -DI and the conditional the endings are -m, -n, -k, -nIz; after other tenses they are -Im, -sIn, -Iz, -sInIz. The third person singular has no ending, and the third person plural uses -lAr.

Participles, verbal nouns and converbs

These turn a verb into an adjective, a noun or an adverb: “the one who does”, “doing”, “having done”, “while doing”.

Word-building suffixes

Derivational suffixes make a new word from an existing one: a noun from a verb, an adjective from a noun, a verb from an adjective.

The ten most common Turkish suffixes

Ranked by the number of word forms in our list whose default analysis contains the suffix. The last column of the tables above gives the same count as a rank.

1. -(s)I — possessive (his/her/its) · 18,789
2. -(y)I — accusative · 15,992
3. -lAr — third-person plural ('they') / noun plural · 13,821
4. -(n)In — genitive · 11,844
5. -(y)A — dative · 11,666
6. -DI — past tense · 10,916
7. -DA — locative · 9,551
8. -mA — negative · 8,581
9. -lArI — possessive (their) · 8,312
10. -(A/I)r — aorist · 8,028

Counts come from a frequency list of 171,155 Turkish word forms built from OpenSubtitles subtitle data (OPUS) and analysed with Zemberek. Subtitle data from OpenSubtitles.org, distributed via OPUS: Lison and Tiedemann (2016), LREC 2016.

Turkish suffixes: frequently asked questions

How many suffixes are there in Turkish?

There is no single agreed number, because it depends on whether you count suffixes, their spelling variants or grammatical categories. The analyser behind Ekle (Zemberek) distinguishes 76 suffix categories, including a few with no written form. This page lists the 56 that occur in at least 40 of the 171,155 word forms we analysed. Most have two or four written variants because of vowel harmony.

In what order do Turkish suffixes go?

The order is fixed. On a noun: stem, word-building suffix, plural -lAr, possessive, case. On a verb: stem, voice (passive or causative), ability, negation -mA, tense or mood, person ending, and the question particle mI last, written as a separate word. In ev-ler-im-de (“in my houses”) the plural comes before the possessive, which comes before the case.

What is vowel harmony in Turkish?

Vowel harmony means the vowel in a suffix matches the last vowel of the word before it. Two-way harmony chooses a or e (kitap-lar, ev-ler). Four-way harmony chooses ı, i, u or ü (kız-ım, ev-im, okul-um, göz-üm). Capital letters in suffix names stand for these choices: A is a/e, I is ı/i/u/ü.

What is the difference between -DA and -DAn?

-DA is the locative and answers “where?”: evde “at home”. -DAn is the ablative and answers “from where?”: evden “from home”. The ablative also expresses “than” in comparisons. Both begin with d after a vowel or a voiced consonant and with t after a voiceless one: okulda, kitapta.

Why is “mi” written separately but still follows vowel harmony?

The question particle mI is a word of its own, so it is spaced from the word before it, but it takes its vowel from that word’s last vowel: geldi mi “did he come?”, hazır mısın “are you ready?”. Any person ending attaches to the particle, not to the verb: geliyor musun.

What are the most common Turkish suffixes?

In our frequency list the ten suffixes found in the most word forms are the third-person possessive -(s)I, the accusative -(y)I, the plural -lAr, the genitive -(n)In, the dative -(y)A, the past tense -DI, the locative -DA, the negative -mA, the third-person plural possessive -lArI and the aorist -(A/I)r. The ranked list is above.

How do I break a Turkish word into its suffixes?

Work from the right. Take off the person ending, then the tense, negation and voice, until you reach a stem you recognise; remember that a stem can change shape (kitap becomes kitab-ı). Check each piece against the tables here. Or type the word into Ekle: it shows the stem and every suffix with its name, free, offline and without an account.