The Turkish Alphabet | Turkish Grammar

Turkish is written in a 29-letter Latin alphabet adopted in 1928, and it may be the single most beginner-friendly thing about the language. Spelling is almost perfectly phonemic: one letter spells one sound, and one sound is spelled with one letter. Once you have learned the handful of unfamiliar letters, you can read any Turkish word aloud correctly on sight — even a word you have never seen, even a place name or a surname. There are no silent letters to memorize, no "ough" traps, no doubled consonants that change a vowel three letters away. The whole system is built to be read exactly as written.

What is different from the English alphabet

The Turkish alphabet drops three letters that English has — q, w, x — and adds seven that English does not: ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş, ü. Crucially, the dotted i and the dotless ı are treated as two completely separate letters, each with its own capital, so the count works out to 29.

Missing from Turkish	How Turkish writes that sound instead
q	spelled k — Katar (Qatar)
w	spelled v — vat (watt), viski (whisky)
x	spelled ks — taksi (taxi), faks (fax)

You will still see q, w, and x in untranslated brand names and foreign words (WhatsApp, taxi on a sign abroad), but they are not part of the alphabet and Turkish never uses them to spell native words.

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The seven added letters — ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş, ü — are not decorations on existing letters. They are full, independent letters with their own dictionary positions and their own names. Treating o and ö as "the same letter with a dot" will send you to the wrong page of a dictionary and, worse, change the word you mean to write.

The full alphabet in order

Here is the complete sequence, in dictionary order, with the name of each letter. Vowels are named simply by their own sound; most consonants are named by the consonant plus an -e (so b is be, c is ce, and so on). The one genuine oddball name is ğ, called yumuşak ge, "soft g."

#	Letter	Name	#	Letter	Name
1	A a	a	16	M m	me
2	B b	be	17	N n	ne
3	C c	ce	18	O o	o
4	Ç ç	çe	19	Ö ö	ö
5	D d	de	20	P p	pe
6	E e	e	21	R r	re
7	F f	fe	22	S s	se
8	G g	ge	23	Ş ş	şe
9	Ğ ğ	yumuşak ge	24	T t	te
10	H h	he	25	U u	u
11	I ı	ı	26	Ü ü	ü
12	İ i	i	27	V v	ve
13	J j	je	28	Y y	ye
14	K k	ke	29	Z z	ze
15	L l	le

Two ordering facts are worth fixing in your mind now, because they govern where words live in a dictionary:

ç comes right after c, ğ right after g, ö right after o, ş right after s, and ü right after u. Each new letter slots in immediately after its plain partner — not at the end of the alphabet.
The dotless ı comes before the dotted i (position 11 before 12). This ordering is the opposite of what English habits suggest, and it matters constantly: kız sorts before kira, because ı precedes i.

ısı · ışık · iç · iki

Dictionary order: the two ı-words (ısı 'heat', ışık 'light') come BEFORE the two i-words (iç 'inside', iki 'two'), because dotless ı sorts before dotted i.

Almost perfectly phonemic — read exactly what you see

This is the headline benefit. Each letter maps to one sound, so a word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled, syllable by syllable, with no surprises. There is no silent e, no soft-versus-hard ambiguity, no vowel that changes value depending on its neighbours.

Merhaba, nasılsın?

Hello, how are you? — read it straight: mer-ha-ba, na-sıl-sın. Every letter is pronounced.

Teşekkür ederim.

Thank you. — te-şek-kür e-de-rim; the double k is genuinely held a beat longer, but nothing is hidden or silent.

Bir bardak su, lütfen.

A glass of water, please. — even on first sight you can pronounce every word correctly.

The sole near-exception to "no silent letters" is ğ (yumuşak ge), which has no sound of its own and instead lengthens the vowel before it. It is the one letter that breaks the otherwise spotless one-letter-one-sound rule, and it gets its own page: Ğ: The Soft G (Yumuşak Ge).

The four false friends: c, j, ş, ç

Four letters look familiar to an English reader but make a sound you would not predict. Memorize these four early — they are the most common source of mis-readings.

Letter	English reader expects	Actual Turkish sound	Example
c	"k" or "s" (as in cat, city)	English j as in jam — /dʒ/	cam = "jahm" (glass)
j	English j as in jam	soft French zh as in measure — /ʒ/	jeton = "zheton" (token)
ş	(unfamiliar letter)	English sh as in shoe — /ʃ/	şu = "shoo" (that)
ç	(unfamiliar letter)	English ch as in chair — /tʃ/	çay = "chai" (tea)

The cleanest way to remember the first two: in Turkish, the English j-sound is spelled c, and the actual letter j is rare — it appears almost only in loanwords and never makes the English j-sound. These two letters get a full treatment, alongside ç, on C, Ç and J; the s/ş/z group is covered on Ş and the S/Z Sounds.

Cuma günü çay içmeye geliyorum.

I'm coming to drink tea on Friday. — note c in 'Cuma' = English j, and ç in 'çay' = English ch.

Şu çocuk çok şeker.

That kid is so sweet/cute. — ş = 'sh', ç = 'ch'; read 'shoo cho-jook chok sheker'.

The biggest trap of all: the two i's

Of all the unfamiliar letters, the dotted/dotless i pair causes the most trouble, because it hides inside two pairs of look-alike letters:

lowercase i (dotted) and ı (dotless)
uppercase İ (dotted) and I (dotless)

These are four different letters in two pairs, not one letter with an optional dot. Confusing them changes words and breaks vowel harmony. And it produces the single most common error English speakers make in Turkish text: writing Istanbul with a dotless capital instead of the correct İstanbul. Because this is so important, it has its own page: The Two I's: i / ı and İ / I.

İstanbul'da yağmur yağıyor.

It's raining in Istanbul. — the city always starts with a dotted capital İ, never a dotless I.

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Because spelling is phonemic, the best way to "learn the alphabet" is not to memorize a chart but to read aloud. Pick up any Turkish sign, menu, or headline and sound it out letter by letter — once the seven extra letters and the four false friends are in place, you will be right almost every time.

Common mistakes

❌ Istanbul

Incorrect — a dotless capital I; this is a different letter from the one the city actually uses.

✅ İstanbul

Istanbul — the capital of the dotted-i letter is İ (with the dot kept).

❌ Citing 'q', 'w', 'x' as Turkish letters

Incorrect — these three are not in the alphabet; native words use k, v, and ks.

✅ taksi, viski, Katar

taxi, whisky, Qatar — the same sounds, spelled with Turkish letters.

❌ cam read as 'kam' or 'sam'

Incorrect — c is never 'k' or 's' in Turkish.

✅ cam = 'jahm'

glass — c always sounds like the English j in 'jam'.

❌ Treating ö, ü, ç, ş as 'o', 'u', 'c', 's' with marks

Incorrect — these are separate letters; dropping the marks spells a different word.

✅ göz ≠ goz, şu ≠ su

'eye' is not 'goz', and 'that' (şu) is not 'water' (su) — the marks are load-bearing.

Key takeaways

The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters: it omits q, w, x and adds ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş, ü.
Spelling is almost perfectly phonemic — one letter, one sound — so you can read any word aloud on sight; the only near-exception is ğ, which lengthens the preceding vowel.
The seven added letters are independent letters, not accented variants, with their own places in dictionary order (ç after c, ğ after g, ö after o, ş after s, ü after u, and dotless ı before dotted i).
Four false friends to learn first: c = English "j", j = French "zh", ş = "sh", ç = "ch".
The dotted/dotless i distinction is the alphabet's biggest trap; never write the city as Istanbul — it is İstanbul.

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