In English, when you drop the head noun from a relative clause you have to prop it up with a placeholder: the ones who came, the thing I said, what you want. Turkish needs no placeholder. Because participles are already nouns, you simply attach the plural and case suffixes directly to the participle and let it stand alone. Gelen ("the one coming") becomes gelenler ("those who came") with nothing added but -ler. This page shows how head-dropping works and why it is automatic.
Participles are nouns, so the head is optional
Every Turkish participle can function as a noun on its own. This is the same nominalization you see when an adjective stands in for a noun — the rich is zenginler — and it is covered more generally in turning adjectives into nouns. Because a participle is built to occupy a noun slot, removing the head noun leaves a perfectly grammatical noun behind.
Start from a full relative clause and delete the head:
| With head noun | Headless | Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| gelen kişi (the person who came) | gelen | the one who came |
| gelen kişiler (the people who came) | gelenler | those who came |
| söylediğim söz (the word I said) | söylediğim | what I said |
The participle simply takes whatever suffixes the missing noun would have taken. Gelen plus the plural -ler gives gelenler; there is no separate word for "ones".
This is genuinely economical compared with English. English cannot leave a relative clause hanging without a noun, so it manufactures a stand-in: the one who, the ones that, those who, what, whatever. Turkish has none of these as separate words. Where English needs three words (the ones who came), Turkish needs one suffix on a verb (gelenler). The trade-off is that you must be comfortable letting a verb form carry plural and case endings, which feels unusual at first but quickly becomes second nature.
Gelenler salonda bekliyor, sen de geç içeri.
Those who came are waiting in the hall; go inside too.
Söylediğim aklında kalsın, sonra anlatırım.
Keep what I said in mind; I'll explain later.
-An without a head: "the one(s) who…"
A headless -An participle names the doer. Add -lAr for the plural, and case endings as needed. This produces some of the most idiomatic short sentences in Turkish.
Bilenler bilir, bu lokantanın künefesi efsane.
Those in the know know it: this restaurant's künefe is legendary.
İlk gelen en iyi yeri kapar.
The first to arrive grabs the best spot.
Bu işten anlayanı bulmak çok zor.
It's very hard to find someone who understands this work.
In that last example, anlayan ("one who understands") takes the accusative -ı directly — anlayanı — because it is the definite object of bulmak. The participle declines like any noun.
-DIK / -(y)AcAK without a head: "what…"
A headless -DIK participle, with its possessive, means "what (someone) did/does". This is how Turkish expresses English what in the sense of "the thing that".
Gördüklerim beni gerçekten şaşırttı.
What I saw really surprised me.
Read gördüklerim in pieces: gördük (the -DIK participle), -ler (plural — the things I saw), -im (1st-person possessive). It means "the things I saw" = "what I saw", and the k stays hard before the plural -ler (gördükler-, never gördüğler-). The headless future participle works the same way:
Yapabileceğin tek şey beklemek.
The only thing you can do is wait.
İstediğini al, hepsi senin için.
Take what you want; it's all for you.
In istediğini, the participle istediği ("what he/she wants" / "what you want") carries the possessive and then the accusative -ni: iste-diğ-i-ni. The buffer -n- appears between the possessive -i and the case ending, exactly as it does on any possessed noun (arabasını). This is strong evidence that the participle is fully nominal: it takes the same possessive-plus-case stack as an ordinary noun.
Anlattıklarını kimse ciddiye almadı.
No one took what he said seriously.
Partitive relatives: "the one(s) of…"
Turkish also uses headless participles partitively — "the one(s) among them that…". The participle stands for a subset, and the larger set appears in the genitive or with a partitive sense.
Öğrencilerin sınavı geçenleri listede yok.
The ones among the students who passed the exam aren't on the list.
Kitaplardan okumadıklarımı kutuya koydum.
I put the ones of the books I hadn't read into the box.
For the underlying choice between -An and -DIK that decides which headless form you build, see choosing -An vs -DIK, and the dedicated -An participle and -DIK participle pages.
Common mistakes
The leading error for English speakers is inserting a separate placeholder word for the one or what.
❌ Olanlar kişiler salonda
Wrong: don't add a separate noun; the headless participle 'olanlar' already means 'those (who there are)'.
✅ Olanlar salonda
Those present are in the hall.
❌ Şey söylediğim doğru
Wrong: don't prop up the participle with a dummy 'şey'; söylediğim alone means 'what I said'.
✅ Söylediğim doğru
What I said is true.
Dropping the possessive on a headless -DIK participle, which is needed to say "what I/you/he did":
❌ Gördükler beni şaşırttı
Wrong: without the possessive -im this isn't 'what I saw'; you need gördüklerim.
✅ Gördüklerim beni şaşırttı
What I saw surprised me.
Forgetting the buffer -n- when adding case to a possessed headless participle:
❌ İstediğii al
Wrong: the accusative attaches with the buffer -n- → istediğini.
✅ İstediğini al
Take what you want.
Softening the k before the plural - leri, where it must stay hard:
❌ Gördüğlerim
Wrong: before -leri the k of -DIK stays hard → gördüklerim.
✅ Gördüklerim
The things I saw / what I saw.
Key takeaways
- Turkish drops the head noun freely because participles are nouns; no placeholder word for the one(s) or what is needed.
- Headless -An names the doer: gelen → gelenler ("those who came"), bilenler bilir.
- Headless -DIK / -(y)AcAK with its possessive means what someone did/will do: gördüklerim, istediğini, yapabileceğin.
- The participle then takes plural and case suffixes exactly like an ordinary noun, including the buffer -n- before case (istediğini) and the hard k before -lAr (gördüklerim).
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Start learning Turkish→Related Topics
- Relative Clauses Without Relative PronounsB1 — How Turkish builds 'the film I saw' and 'the man who called me' with pre-nominal participles instead of who, which, or that.
- The Subject Participle -AnB1 — How -An turns a verb into a relative clause when the head noun is the subject of that verb, and why it never takes a possessive ending.
- The Object/Factive Participle -DIKB1 — How -DIK plus a possessive suffix relativizes objects and obliques (gördüğüm adam) and nominalizes past/non-future facts in complement clauses.
- Adjectives Used as NounsB1 — Because Turkish adjectives and nouns share the same suffix slots, any adjective can stand in for the noun it modifies — güzel 'pretty' becomes güzeli 'the pretty one', and yaşlılar means 'the elderly'.