Turkish has no relative pronouns — no who, which, or that. Instead it turns the verb itself into an adjective and places the whole clause in front of the noun, exactly where any ordinary adjective goes. The -An participle is the first and simplest tool for this, and it does one job: it relativizes the subject of its clause. Gelen adam is "the man who comes / who came", ağlayan çocuk is "the crying child / the child who is crying". This page shows you when to reach for -An — and the overview of relative clauses shows how it fits the larger system.
What -An means: the noun is the subject
The single fact that controls everything here: use -An when the noun you are describing is the one doing the verb. Put differently, if you could rebuild the relationship as "the noun ... verbs", you want -An.
Think of koşan köpek. The dog runs — köpek koşar — so the dog is the subject of koşmak, and "the dog that runs" is koşan köpek. The participle simply hangs in front, like a colour word would.
Kapıyı açan kişi yan komşumuzdu.
The person who opened the door was our next-door neighbour.
Sürekli ağlayan bir bebekle uçakta sekiz saat geçirdik.
We spent eight hours on the plane with a constantly crying baby.
Bahçede koşan köpek bizim değil.
The dog running in the garden isn't ours.
In each case the head noun (kişi, bebek, köpek) is what performs the action. That is the green light for -An. Contrast this with English, which forces you to choose who for people and which/that for things; Turkish does not care — gelen adam and gelen tren use the identical participle.
Form: -An, -en, and the buffer -y-
The suffix has just two vowel shapes, following the two-way (back/front) rule rather than the four-way rule:
- back-vowel stems take -an: koş-an, bak-an, yaz-an, çalış-an
- front-vowel stems take -en: gel-en, gör-en, bil-en, gül-en
When the stem ends in a vowel, a buffer -y- is inserted so two vowels never collide:
- bekle- → bekleyen ("waiting / who waits")
- yürü- → yürüyen ("walking")
- oku- → okuyan ("reading / who reads")
- ağla- → ağlayan ("crying")
Otobüs durağında bekleyen kadın annemmiş.
The woman waiting at the bus stop turned out to be my mother.
Hızlı okuyan öğrenciler sınavı erken bitirdi.
The students who read fast finished the exam early.
| Stem | Type | Participle | Gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| gel- | front, consonant-final | gelen | who comes / came |
| koş- | back, consonant-final | koşan | who runs / ran |
| bekle- | front, vowel-final | bekleyen | who waits / waited |
| oku- | back, vowel-final | okuyan | who reads / read |
-An carries no tense of its own
This trips up English speakers badly. Gelen can mean "who comes", "who is coming", "who came", or "who will come" — the participle itself is tense-neutral, and the surrounding sentence supplies the time.
Yarın gelen tren iptal edilmiş.
The train (that is) coming tomorrow has been cancelled.
Dün gelen misafirler çok yorgundu.
The guests who came yesterday were very tired.
The same gelen points to the future in the first sentence (yarın, "tomorrow") and the past in the second (dün, "yesterday"). English needs three different verb shapes — who is coming, who came — where Turkish needs one. Do not try to load tense onto -An; let the adverbs and context do that work.
Bu fabrikada çalışan insanlar genellikle yakın köylerden geliyor.
The people who work in this factory generally come from nearby villages.
A whole clause can sit in front of -An
The participle does not have to be a bare verb. Everything that belongs to the embedded clause — objects, adverbs, place phrases — lines up in front of the participle, and the head noun comes last.
Her sabah parkta köpeğini gezdiren yaşlı adamı tanıyorum.
I know the old man who walks his dog in the park every morning.
Sınıfta İngilizce konuşan tek öğrenci sendin.
You were the only student who spoke English in class.
Read these from the inside out: her sabah parkta köpeğini gezdir- ("walks his dog in the park every morning") is the whole clause, -en turns it into a modifier, and yaşlı adam is the noun it lands on. The mental move for an English speaker is to start with the noun, then unfold the clause leftward.
Common mistakes
1. Using -An when the noun is the object, not the subject. This is the number-one error. If the noun is acted upon, you need -DIK, not -An.
❌ dün gören adam
Wrong if you mean 'the man I saw' — this actually means 'the man who saw (someone)', because -An makes the noun the subject.
✅ dün gördüğüm adam
The man (whom) I saw yesterday.
If you did the seeing and the man was seen, the man is the object — so -DIK with possessive agreement is required.
2. Forgetting the buffer -y- after a vowel. Two vowels never sit next to each other across this suffix.
❌ beklean yolcular
Wrong — bekle- ends in a vowel, so a buffer -y- is needed.
✅ bekleyen yolcular
The waiting passengers.
3. Adding a possessive ending to -An. -An never agrees with anything.
❌ koşanım köpek
Wrong — -An takes no possessive suffix at all.
✅ koşan köpek
The dog that runs / the running dog.
4. Using the four-way vowel rule. -An is two-way only — never -ün or -ın.
❌ gülün çocuk
Wrong — the suffix harmonises two ways, so it must be -en after a front vowel.
✅ gülen çocuk
The smiling child.
5. Trying to mark tense on the participle. There is no past -An or future -An; the clause supplies the time.
❌ geldien misafirler
Wrong if you mean 'the guests who came' — there is no past form of -An; use plain gelen plus a time word.
✅ dün gelen misafirler
The guests who came yesterday.
Key takeaways
- -An relativizes the subject of its clause: the head noun does the verb (gelen adam, koşan köpek).
- It has two vowel shapes (-an/-en) and inserts a buffer -y- after vowel-final stems (bekleyen, okuyan).
- It carries no possessive ending and no tense — the rest of the sentence supplies the time.
- The moment the head noun is an object or oblique rather than the subject, switch to -DIK; the decision between the two is laid out in choosing -An vs -DIK.
- Bare attributive uses (akan su, uçan daire) shade into ordinary participial adjectives.
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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 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.
- -An vs -DIK: Which Relative ParticipleB1 — The one test that decides every Turkish relative clause: is the head noun doing the action (-An) or having it done to it (-DIK)?
- Adjectives from Verbs (Participles as Modifiers)B2 — Turkish has no relative pronoun; instead a participle turns a whole verb phrase into a pre-nominal adjective, so 'the man who came' is literally 'the came-man' — gelen adam.