Predicative Adjectives and the Zero Copula

In English, "I am tired" has three words and the middle one — am — is a verb. Turkish has no such verb in the present tense. Instead, the person ending that English packs into am / is / are is glued straight onto the adjective: Yorgunum "I am tired" is one word, yorgun "tired" plus the ending -um "I am." This page is about adjectives used as predicates — the thing the sentence asserts about the subject — and the small set of copular person endings they take. Master these and you can already make hundreds of complete sentences with no verb at all.

There is no "to be" in the present

This is the single most important fact on the page, so let it sink in before anything else. When you want to say X is [adjective], you do not translate "is." You take the adjective and, if the subject is I, you, we, or you-plural, you attach a copular person ending. For he/she/it and they, you usually attach nothing at all.

So the structure is Subject + Adjective-with-ending, and the "be" lives inside that ending. English speakers instinctively look for a word to translate "am/is/are" — there isn't one. The job is done by a suffix (or, in the third person, by silence). This is why Turkish is sometimes said to have a zero copula in the present: the copula is real, it is just unspoken in he/she/it/they.

In the second sentence, Hava güzel "The weather is nice" has no ending at all on güzel — the third-person predicate is simply bare. There is nothing between hava "weather" and güzel "nice," and yet it is a full sentence meaning "The weather is nice."

The copular person endings

Here are the present-tense copular endings, the heart of this page. The capital letters mean the suffix harmonizes: the I stands for one of ı / i / u / ü, chosen by the last vowel of the adjective. The (y) is a buffer consonant that appears only when the adjective ends in a vowel.

Read the table by columns. With a consonant-final adjective like zengin "rich," you simply add the ending. With a vowel-final adjective like mutlu "happy," you first insert a y so that two vowels don't collide: mutlu + y + um = mutluyum "I am happy."

Notice how the four-way harmony plays out: mutlu ends in u, so the I surfaces as u → mutluyum. Zengin ends in i, so it surfaces as i → zenginim. Nazik ends in i, so → naziksiniz. You are not learning new endings here, just the four-way harmony you already know, applied to the copula.

The buffer -y- on vowel-final adjectives

The first-person and first-person-plural endings begin with a vowel: -Im, -Iz. When the adjective already ends in a vowel, Turkish refuses to let the two vowels touch and slips a y between them. This is the same buffer consonant you meet all over the language.

• hasta "sick" → hasta
  • y
    • ım = hastayım "I am sick"
• mutlu "happy" → mutluyum "I am happy"
• meraklı "curious" → meraklıyım "I'm curious"

The consonant-initial endings (-sIn, -sInIz) and the third person (no ending) never need the buffer, because no vowel clash arises.

Asking "are you …?" — the question particle

To turn a predicate adjective into a yes/no question, Turkish uses the separate, harmonizing particle mı / mi / mu / mü, written as its own word, and the person ending hops onto the particle. So "Are you ready?" is Hazır mısın? — hazır "ready" plus the question word mı plus the -sın "you" ending.

Note that the question particle harmonizes to the adjective in front of it: hazır (back, unrounded) → mısın; yorgun (back, rounded) → musun. The particle is always written separately — hazır mısın, never hazırmısın.

The third person and the optional -DIr

In the third person, the bare adjective is the normal, everyday predicate: Hava güzel "The weather is nice," O çok zeki "He/she is very clever." But there is a formal, written suffix -DIr that can be attached to the third-person predicate. It adds a tone of generality, certainty, or officialdom and is common in definitions, signs, and formal prose.

• güzel "(it) is nice" (everyday)
• güzeldir "(it) is nice / is beautiful" (formal, dictionary-like)

In casual speech you would just say İstanbul çok kalabalık "Istanbul is very crowded." Reserve -DIr for written, formal, or general-truth statements; sprinkling it into ordinary conversation sounds stiff and bureaucratic.

Plural subjects: the optional -lAr

When the subject is onlar "they" or a plural noun, the predicate may take -lAr to agree, but it is optional and often dropped, especially when the subject is already plural or clearly understood.

Both Çocuklar mutlu and Çocuklar mutlular are correct. With non-human plural subjects, the plural ending on the predicate is usually omitted: Elmalar taze "The apples are fresh," not normally tazeler.

Common mistakes

The pattern behind every one of these errors is the same: English-speaker habit of inserting a separate "be" word, or forgetting that the ending already encodes the person. Once you trust the suffix, the sentences become short and natural.

Key takeaways

• There is no verb "to be" in the present. The adjective is the predicate and carries the person ending itself.
• The copular endings are -(y)Im, -sIn, -Ø, -(y)Iz, -sInIz, -lAr, all subject to four-way harmony: zenginim, zenginsin, zengin, zenginiz, zenginsiniz.
• Insert the buffer y before the vowel-initial endings on a vowel-final adjective: mutlu → mutluyum, hasta → hastayım.
• The third person is bare in speech (Hava güzel) and takes formal -DIr only in writing or general truths (güzeldir).
• Questions use the separate particle mı/mi/mu/mü with the person ending on it: Hazır mısın?
• For the full copular system across all tenses, see the copula overview.