Skip to Main Content

University Library

LibGuides

Turkish Language: Dictionaries and Grammar

Dictionaries

Seslisözlük is a Turkish-English, English-Turkish voiced dictionary.  Other language translations, and a phone app for Droid or iPhone are also available.

Sözlükte is one of the best online dictionaries for the Turkish language.  This is a multilingual online dictionary: English--German--Spanish--Russian--French--Italian...

IngilizceTurkce.com is an online English-Turkish dictionary and translation resource.

For a more extensive list of dictionaries, check out Omniglot.

 

Turkish Alphabet

Turkish Alphabet with pronunciation, taken from TurkishClass.com:

A - a   as in  "ugly "

B - be  as in  "bell"

C - ce  as in  "jealous"

Ç - çe  as in "chair"

D - de  as in  "decade"

E - e   as in  "elephant"

F - fe  as in  "federal"

G - ge  as in  "get"

Ğ - ğe*

H - he  as in  "helicopter"

I - ı  as in "number"

İ - i   as in  "insect"

J - je  as in  "azure" (garaj = garage, pronounced as in French & English)

K - ke  as in "kettle"

L - le  as in  "leg"

M - me  as in "men"

N - ne  as in  "never"

O - o   as in  "orchestra"

Ö - ö   as in "urge"

P - pe  as in  "pen"

R - re  as in  "red"

S - se  as in  "sell"

Ş - şe  as in  "shelf"

T - te  as in  "telephone"

U - u  as in  "oops!"

Ü - ü  as in "fruit, nude"

V - ve  as in  "vegetable"

Y - ye  as in  "yes"

Z - ze  as in  "zebra"

*NOT: Türkçe'de Ğ harfi ile başlayan kelime yoktur.

*NOTE: There is no word that begins with the letter Ğ in Turkish.

Turkish Language Overview

Overview taken from Omniglot, whose website has a fantastic list of links to Turkish language learning tools, dictionaries, phrases, chatrooms and more.

Origin

Turkish is a Turkic language spoken mainly in Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Cyprus. In 2017 there were 71 million native speakers of Turkish, and about 17 million second language speakers. Turkish is an official language in Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Cyprus, and there are also Turkish speakers in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia.

Turkish is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish, and there is considerable mutual intelligibility between these languages.

The ancestor of modern Turkish, Oghuz, was bought to Anatolia from Central Asia during the 11th century AD by Seljuq Turks. This developed into Ottoman Turkish, and contained many loanwords from Arabic and Persian.

Until 1928 Turkish was written with a version of the Perso-Arabic script known as the Ottoman Turkish script. In 1928, as part of his efforts to modernise Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk issued a decree replacing the Arabic script with a version of the Latin alphabet, which has been used ever since. Arabic and Persian loanwords were also replaced with Turkish equivalents. Nowadays, only scholars and those who learnt to read before 1928 can read Turkish written in the Ottoman Turkish script.

Turkish at a Glance

Native name: Türkçe [ˈtyɾct͡ʃɛ]
Linguistic affliation: Turkic, Common Turkic, Oghuz, Western Oghuz
Number of speakers: c. 88 million
Spoken in: Turkey, Northern Cyprus, Cyprus, Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece
First written: 11th century
Writing system: Ottoman Turkish script, Latin script
Status: official language in Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Cyprus. Recognised minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Iraq, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania

  •  

Turkish Language Tools

Verbix offers a verb conjugation service for Turkish.

When working with illegible scripts in Ottoman Turkish, Lexi Qamus offers an Ottoman word solver.

This Turkik Langauges Writing Program offers a keyboard of Modern Turkic Languages.

Library of Congress offers guidelines for transliterating Ottoman Turkish.

UIUC International Area Studies offers a list of Turkish Language encyclopedias.