Relative Clauses Without Relative Pronouns

Turkish has no words for who, which, or that as relative pronouns. Where English bolts a relative clause onto the end of a noun with one of these little words, Turkish does the opposite: it turns the verb into a participle and stacks the entire clause in front of the noun, like a long adjective. This page gives you the whole system in one view so the individual participle pages make sense as parts of a single machine.

There is no relative pronoun — the verb does the work

In English, the relative pronoun is the hinge: the man *who called me, the film **that I saw*. Turkish deletes that hinge entirely and instead changes the verb's ending. The choice of ending tells you what role the missing noun plays inside the clause.

There are three participles, and choosing between them is the core skill:

Notice the contrast in the first two rows. They use the same verb, aramak (to call), and translate the same noun, kişi (person), but the relationship is mirror-image. In beni arayan kişi, the person is doing the calling — they are the subject — so you use -An. In benim aradığım kişi, the person is being called by me — they are the object — so you use -DIK with a possessive ending agreeing with me.

The clause goes before the noun, not after

This is the single biggest adjustment for English speakers. In English the verb sits far from the head noun, separated by everything else: the film I saw yesterday. In Turkish the participle is glued directly to the front of the head noun, and everything else in the clause lines up before the participle.

Read the Turkish in order: dün (yesterday) → gördüğüm (that-I-saw) → film (film). The participle gördüğüm sits right against film, and the time word dün comes first. The whole block dün gördüğüm behaves exactly like an adjective: it answers "which film?".

A longer example shows how much can pile up before the noun. Take the book that the teacher gave me. English keeps the verb gave near the end; Turkish renders it roughly as "the teacher-to-me-given book":

Here öğretmenin (the teacher's, genitive) is the subject of the embedded verb, bana (to me) is an indirect object, verdiği (that-gave) is the -DIK participle agreeing with the embedded subject, and kitabı (the book) is the head noun. Everything left of kitap describes it.

Why the system looks the way it does

The logic becomes clear once you see that Turkish treats participles as adjectives, and Turkish adjectives always precede their noun. Kırmızı araba is "red car"; bana verilen araba is "the to-me-given car". A relative clause is just a heavier adjective made out of a verb, so it obeys the same word-order rule. There is no relative pronoun because there is no slot for one — the participle ending already encodes the grammatical relationship that English would spell out with who or that.

The -DIK and -(y)AcAK participles carry a possessive suffix because they are, grammatically, nouns of action that "belong to" their subject. Aradığım literally packages "my-having-called", and the subject of that calling shows up in the genitive, just like a possessor. That is why benim aradığım parallels benim arabam (my car): same possessive machinery. The dedicated word-order page drills this genitive-subject frame in full.

A quick build-it walkthrough

Take the English the email you'll send. Work backwards:

1. Head noun: e-posta (email). It is the object of send, so this is a non-subject relative.
2. It is future, so use -(y)AcAK, not -DIK.
3. The subject is you (singular), so the possessive on the participle is -ın, and the subject appears as senin (your, genitive).

Result: senin göndereceğin e-posta.

Compare a subject relative built from the same kind of verb, where no possessive and no genitive subject appear because the head noun is the subject:

Common mistakes

English speakers consistently try to keep the English shape — clause after the noun, with a pronoun. Turkish refuses both.

Using -An when the head noun is the object is the classic role-confusion error:

Forgetting the possessive on -DIK strips the agreement the clause depends on:

Key takeaways

• Turkish has no relative pronouns. The verb becomes a participle and the whole clause sits before the head noun.
• Use -An when the head noun is the subject of the clause; use -DIK + possessive (past/present) or -(y)AcAK + possessive (future) when it is a non-subject.
• The -DIK/-(y)AcAK participle carries a possessive suffix that agrees with the embedded subject, and that subject appears in the genitive.
• One diagnostic question — is the head noun the doer? — decides the whole construction.