Turkish Alphabet

Expand Your Knowledge About the Turkish Alphabet and Script

Turkish alphabet

The Turkish alphabet replaced the old Ottoman Arabic alphabet in 1928 and contains 29 letters, including 8 vowels and 21 consonants. There are no Q, W, X, instead there are six additional letters; Ç, Ğ, S, Ö, Ü, and I.

The letter I is used with and without a dot at the top of it depending on the word used. The other letters are common in the Latin alphabet. The Turkish letters are pronounced differently. Among these special Turkish letters ç, ö, and ü are included in the standard Western words under ISO-8859-1.

Turkish letters

The Turkish alphabet is composed of the following letters:

A, B, C, Ç, D, E, F, G, Ğ, H, I, İ, J, K, L, M, N, O, Ö, P, R, S, Ş, T, U, Ü, V, Y, Z

Other sources on Turkish alphabet

Princeton University offers the Turkish alphabet with sample Turkish words. Here’s another source for the Turkish alphabet. Turkish language is included in the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) which is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Turkish and Ottoman Scripts

The Latin script is easier to pronounce, as it is largely phonemic. On the other hand, the Ottoman script is easier to understand because its morphophonemic structure.

Turkish alphabet collation chart is another tool that you may want to use.

The Turks started using Arabic alphabet after adopting Islam religion about a millennium ago. Certain parts of former Russia kept using the old Turkish form of writing. The current Turkish alphabet is in Roman script as adopted in 1928.

Transition to Modern Turkish Language and Alphabet

Most linguists agree that the Persian and Arabic scripts with 612 different characters used by the Ottomans did not meet the needs of the Turkish language as they were not adopted to meet specific needs of a different culture but kept as-is. The Turkish language required only 70 characters, including letters, capitals, and the numbers. The Arabic alphabet was not able to address the special and rich sounds in the Turkish language.

Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey wanted to create a language that would be simpler than the Arabic script in order to reach masses of population in improving the literacy rate. Many reformers believed that the Arabic script was one of the major reasons why the country had so many illiterate people when Ataturk took over.

Simple steps in learning Turkish alphabet

The Turkish alphabet is easy to learn for children as well as for foreigners who can start talking after few days of studying the phonetic values of the orthographic signs.