Postpositions, Not Prepositions

English puts little relational words before the noun — for me, toward home, after lunch. Turkish puts the equivalent words after the noun, which is why they are called postpositions rather than prepositions. That word-order flip is easy to absorb. The part that trips learners up is the second rule: each postposition demands a specific case on the noun in front of it, and you simply have to learn which case goes with which postposition. This page maps out the whole landscape so the detail pages make sense.

The flip: the relational word comes last

A Turkish postposition follows its complement. "For me" is benim için (literally "me-for"); "toward the house" is eve doğru ("house-to toward"); "after lunch" is yemekten sonra ("lunch-from after"). Read the noun first, then the postposition.

Notice in those three that the noun before the postposition is in three different shapes: senin (genitive), kapıya (dative, ending -a), dersten (ablative, ending -ten). That is not random — it is the heart of the system.

The "after the noun" order is not a quirk of these words; it is how the entire language is built. Turkish is consistently head-final: the modifier comes before the thing it modifies, the object comes before the verb, and the relational word comes after the noun it relates. So a postposition is exactly what you'd predict from the rest of Turkish grammar — the same logic that puts the verb at the end of the sentence puts için after senin. Once you stop expecting an English-style preposition and start reading right-to-left from the postposition back to its noun, these constructions parse themselves.

The core rule: the postposition selects the case

Every postposition lexically governs one case. You do not choose the case from meaning; it is a fixed property of the word, just like English verbs that demand a particular preposition (depend on, consist of). Turkish postpositions fall into three case classes:

kadar appears twice because it has two distinct senses: a bare/genitive complement for "as much as" (benim kadar "as much as me") and a dative complement for "up to / until" (akşama kadar "until evening"). That overlap aside, each postposition lives in exactly one box.

Class 1: bare or genitive complement

The highest-frequency postpositions — için "for", gibi "like/as", kadar "as much as", ile "with" — take a bare noun but a genitive pronoun. A full noun appears in its plain dictionary form; a personal pronoun must be in the genitive.

The bare-noun-but-genitive-pronoun split is the single most error-prone point in the whole system, so it has its own page: postpositions with bare/genitive complements. The standout member, için, with its purpose and cause meanings, is treated on için: purpose, cause, benefit.

Class 2: dative complement

These postpositions demand the dative -(y)A on the noun in front of them: göre "according to / compared to", doğru "toward", rağmen "despite", and kadar in its "up to / until" sense.

For the full set and their idioms, see dative postpositions. Note bana göre — with pronouns, the dative form is bana, sana, ona, bize, size, onlara, not a genitive.

Class 3: ablative complement

These take the ablative -DAn ("from"): önce "before", sonra "after", beri "since", dolayı "because of".

The detail page is ablative postpositions. A useful pattern: önce and sonra also combine with a time amount in the bare form — iki gün önce "two days ago", bir saat sonra "an hour later" — where the measure word stays bare and only a referenced noun takes the ablative (Dersten iki saat sonra).

The special case of ile

ile "with" belongs to the bare/genitive class, but it is special because it has a suffixal variant -(y)lA that attaches directly to the noun: arkadaşım ile = arkadaşımla "with my friend"; sen ile = seninle "with you" (note the genitive-like senin- base before it). The clitic form is far more common in speech. This is important enough that ile gets its own page: ile: 'with' and the -(y)lA clitic.

Common mistakes

Putting the postposition before the noun (English word order). Turkish is rigidly postpositional.

Guessing the case instead of learning it with the postposition. Using the dative with için, or the bare form with doğru, is a fixed error.

Using a bare or nominative pronoun before bare/genitive postpositions. *ben için is one of the most recognizable learner errors.

Mismatching the pronoun case to the wrong class. göre is dative, so it's bana göre, never benim göre.

Key takeaways

• Turkish has postpositions: they follow the noun (senin için, eve doğru, dersten sonra).
• Each postposition lexically governs a case — learn the case as part of the word.
• Bare/genitive: için, ile, gibi, kadar — bare for full nouns, genitive for pronouns.
• Dative: göre, doğru, rağmen, (kadar "until").
• Ablative: önce, sonra, beri, dolayı.
• ile has a clitic form -(y)lA (arkadaşımla) that dominates in speech.