The -ki of Place and Time: evdeki, dünkü

There is a tiny suffix in Turkish that does the work English needs a whole relative clause for. Stick -ki onto a locative phrase — a phrase already carrying the -DA "at/in/on" ending — and you get "the one that is there": masada "on the table" becomes masadaki "the one on the table." Add it to a time word and you get the possessive of time: dün "yesterday" becomes dünkü "yesterday's." This page is about that single, enormously useful move. Master it and you stop building clunky clauses for things Turkish handles in three letters.

The core idea: -ki makes a phrase into a modifier

Turkish is full of phrases that describe where or when something is: evde "at home," masada "on the table," kapıda "at the door," dün "yesterday." On their own, these are adverbs — they tell you where the verb happens. But often you want to turn that location into a description of a thing: not "at home" but "the keys that are at home."

English does this with a relative clause: "the keys that are at home." Turkish does it with -ki. You take the locative phrase and add -ki, and the whole thing becomes an adjective — or, with no noun after it, a pronoun meaning "the one (that is) there."

Notice there is no verb "to be," no "that," no "which." Masadaki alone carries all of "that is on the table." The structure is simply locative + ki + noun, and the -ki phrase behaves exactly like an ordinary adjective sitting in front of its noun.

-ki does not harmonize (with two exceptions)

Almost every Turkish suffix changes its vowel to match the word it joins — that is vowel harmony, the engine of the whole language. The locative itself harmonizes: evde but masada, okulda but köyde. So your instinct will scream that -ki should become -kı after a back vowel: masadakı. It does not. -ki is one of the rare suffixes that stays the same no matter what. It is always -ki, never -kı, -ku, or -kü.

So it is çantadaki, not çantadakı, even though çanta has only back vowels. Drill this, because it is a place learners reliably slip.

The two exceptions are time words built on dün, bugün, yarın (and a few like gün, akşam). After these, -ki rounds to -kü/-kı under the influence of the rounded or back vowel:

The pattern: dünkü and bugünkü round to -kü (the ü of dün/gün pulls it), while yarınki keeps -ki (because yarın ends in ı, which rounds nothing — so here it actually stays -ki). The honest summary: treat dünkü and bugünkü as the two forms to memorize, and everywhere else -ki stays put.

Time -ki vs. locative -ki

The two uses look identical but come from slightly different places. With a location, -ki attaches to a -DA locative: masa-da-ki, ev-de-ki — the -DA is always there. With a time word, -ki attaches directly to the bare word, no locative in between: dün-kü, yarın-ki. That is because words like dün and yarın are already temporal adverbs and do not need (and do not take) a locative ending.

So you say dünkü, not dündeki. The contrast:

The first uses bare time words (sabahki, akşamki); the second uses a full locative (buzdolabında "in the fridge" → buzdolabındaki).

Using -ki as a pronoun: "the one..."

Drop the noun after a -ki phrase and it becomes a pronoun meaning "the one." This is where -ki earns its keep in real conversation, because it lets you avoid repeating a noun everyone already knows.

In masadakini, watch what happened: the pronoun masadaki took the accusative ending -i, but first an -n- appeared between them: masadaki-n-i. This buffer -n- is obligatory whenever a -ki pronoun takes a case ending — accusative, dative, locative, ablative, genitive. It is the same pronominal n you see in bunu, ona.

-ki on possessors: benimki, Ali'ninki

There is a sister use worth flagging because it looks the same and behaves the same. Add -ki to a genitive (possessor) form and you get the standalone possessive pronoun — "mine, yours, Ali's":

This benim-ki, Ali'nin-ki is the same relativizing -ki: "the one that is mine/Ali's." It is covered fully on the standalone possessive pronouns page; here just note that it inflects identically — benimkini, benimkine — with the same buffer -n-.

Don't confuse this with the conjunction ki

Turkish has a completely separate, standalone word ki — written as its own word with a space, borrowed from Persian — that links clauses ("...such that," "...so that," "...which"). That ki is a connector and never attaches to a noun. The suffix -ki on this page is glued onto the end of a word with no space. Same two letters, unrelated jobs. See the conjunction ki page for the separate word.

Common mistakes

The biggest trap is the first one: harmony is so automatic in Turkish that learners "fix" masadaki into masadakı and feel proud of it. Resist. The second trap is building a full olan/relative clause when -ki would be cleaner — see relative clauses overview for when you genuinely do need the clause (any time the description involves a verb, not just a location).

Key takeaways

• -ki turns a locative phrase into a modifier or pronoun: masada "on the table" → masadaki "the one on the table." No relative clause needed.
• The recipe: noun + -DA (locative) + -ki. For time words, -ki attaches directly: dün → dünkü.
• -ki does not harmonize — it stays -ki even after back vowels (çantadaki, not çantadakı). The exceptions to memorize are the rounded time forms dünkü and bugünkü.
• As a pronoun ("the one"), a -ki word takes a buffer -n- before any case ending: evdeki → evdekini, evdekine.
• Don't confuse the suffix -ki (glued on, this page) with the separate word ki (a clause connector).