How to read and say Turkish
Letters, sounds and stress from Wikivoyage's Turkish phrasebook. Then hear the phrases and practice them, free.
▶ Practice Turkish phrasesTurkish pronunciation looks daunting to non-native speakers, as many of the words are very long and look like tongue-twisters. With a bit of practice, however, it becomes much easier. The spelling of Turkish is phonetic, so once knowing the pronunciation of each letter the reading should not be a problem, since all words are pronounced exactly how they are written. However Turkish has some vowel sounds that are not known in many other languages, so they can be hard to learn.
Vowels
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The harmony of vowels
Turkish has an unusual feature called vowel harmony: words contain either front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) or back vowels (a, ı, o, u), but not both at the same time, unless it's a compound or loanword. This extends to conjugations, so it's Türkiye'de for "in Turkey" but Almanya'da for "in Germany". |
The Turkish vowels are
- A - a short sound, as in the English father
- E - a short sound, as in the English pet
- İ - the sound in the English meet and at the beginning of İstanbul (ees-tan-bul)
- I - the short "schwa" vowel. This vowel exists in English although there is no specific letter for it. It is the 'i' in pencil and the 'e' in taken.
- O - as in the English order
- Ö - pronounced as in German, a blend of "o" and "e", with lips rounded.
- U - short as in the English put
- Ü - pronounced as in German, make a sound like "ee", but round your lips like you are going to say "oo"
Remember that, in lower case, the two letters İ and I look different as well. The lower case form of İ is i, while the lower case form of I is ı.
Consonants
- B - as in bed
- C - equivalent to J, as in the English jump.
- Ç - the "ch" sound in the English chapel
- D - as in drum
- F - as in far
- G - as in girl
- Ğ - a silent letter which serves to lengthen the previous vowel at the end of a word or between identical vowels, a very slight form of y (with the tongue in a lower position) elsewhere
- H - as in hello
- J - the soft (or "French") G sound in words such as visage and menagerie.
- K - as in king
- L - as in love
- M - as in man
- N - as in new
- P - as in print
- R - a tricky consonant in Turkish, most often rolled very lightly
- S - as in snake
- Ş - the "sh" sound in the English shake
- T - as in take
- V - roughly the mid-point between the "v" in very and the "w" in was
- Y - as in yet
- Z - as in zoo