Turkish alphabet

The Turkish alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. Mandated in 1928 as part of Atatürk's Reforms, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
The Turkish alphabet has been the model for the official Latinization of several Turkic languages formerly written in the Arabic or Cyrillic script like Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and recently Kazakh.

Letters

The following table presents the Turkish letters, the sounds they correspond to in International Phonetic Alphabet and how these can be approximated more or less by an English speaker.

Uppercase	Lowercase	Name	Name	Value	English approximation
A	a	a			As a in father
B	b	be			As b in boy
C'	c	ce			As j in joy
Ç'	ç	çe			As ch in chair
D'	d	de			As d in dog
E'	e	e			As e in red
F	f	fe			As f in far
G'	g	ge		,	As g in garage
Ğ'	ğ	yumuşak ge		,,	—
H	h	he, ha, haş	,		As h in hot
I'	ı	ı			Close back unrounded vowel, like ㅡ in Korean 강릉 Similar to o in ballot to a Turkish speaker's ears
İ	i	i			As ee in cheese
J	j	je			As s in measure
K	k	ke, ka	,	,	As k in keen Similar to k'' in kit
L	l	le		,	As l'' in love
M'	m	me			As m in make
N'	n	ne			As n in nice
O'	o	o			As o in more
Ö	ö	ö			Open-mid front rounded vowel, like eu in French jeune Similar to u in nurse, with lips rounded
P	p	pe			As p in pin
R'	r	re			As tt in American English better
S	s	se			As s in song
Ş'	ş	şe			As sh in show
T'	t	te			As t in tick
U'	u	u			As oo in tool
Ü	ü	ü			Close front rounded vowel, like u in French tu Similar to u in cute
V	v	ve			As v in vat
Y'	y	ye			As y in yes
Z'	z	ze			As z in zigzag
Q	q	kû, kü	,	—	—
W	w	çift ve, double u		—	—
X	x	iks		—	—

Of the 29 letters, eight are vowels ; the other 21 are consonants.
Dotted and dotless I are distinct letters in Turkish such that ⟨i⟩ becomes ⟨İ⟩ when capitalised, ⟨I⟩ being the capital form of ⟨ı⟩.
Turkish also adds a circumflex over the back vowels ⟨â⟩ and ⟨û⟩ following ⟨k⟩, ⟨g⟩, or ⟨l⟩ when these consonants represent,, and :

â for and/or to indicate that the consonant before â is palatalised; e.g. kâr means "profit", while kar means "snow".
î for .
û for and/or to indicate palatalisation.

In the case of length distinction, these letters are used for old Arabic and Persian borrowings from the Ottoman Turkish period, most of which have been eliminated from the language. Native Turkish words have no vowel length distinction. The combinations of,, and with and also mainly occur in loanwords, but may also occur in native Turkish compound words, as in the name Dilâçar.
Turkish orthography is highly regular and a word's pronunciation is usually identified by its spelling.

Distinctive features

and dotless I are separate letters, each with its own uppercase and lowercase forms. The lowercase form of I is ı, and the lowercase form of İ is i. The letter J, however, uses a tittle in the same way English does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dotless uppercase version.
Optional circumflex accents can be used with "â", "î" and "û" to disambiguate words with different meanings but otherwise the same spelling, or to indicate palatalisation of a preceding consonant, or long vowels in loanwords, particularly from Arabic.

Software localisation

In software development, the Turkish alphabet is known for requiring special logic, particularly due to the varieties of i and their lowercase and uppercase versions. This has been called the Turkish-I problem.

History

Early reform proposals and alternate scripts

The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the Orkhon script, also known as the Old Turkic alphabet, the first surviving evidence of which dates from the 7th century. In general, Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets including Uyghur, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and some other Asiatic writing systems.
Ottoman Turkish was written using a Turkish form of the Arabic script for over 1,000 years. It was poorly suited to write works that incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary as their spellings were largely unphonetic and thus had to be memorized. This created a significant barrier of entry as only highly formal and prestige versions of Turkish were top heavy in Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Not only would students have trouble predicting the spellings of certain Arabic and Persian words, but some of these words were so rarely used in common speech that their spellings would not register in the collective conscious of students. However, it was much better suited to the Turkish part of the vocabulary. Although Ottoman Turkish was never formally standardized by a decree of law, words of Turkic origin largely had de facto systematic spelling rules associated with them which made it easier to read and write. On the rare occasion a Turkic word had irregular spelling that had to be memorized, there was often a dialectal or historic phonetic rationale that would be validated by observing the speech of eastern dialects, Azeri, and Turkmen. Whereas Arabic is rich in consonants but poor in vowels, Turkish is the opposite; the script was thus inadequate at distinguishing certain Turkish vowels and the reader was forced to rely on context to differentiate certain words. The introduction of the telegraph in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script, although this was buoyed to some degree by advances in the printing press and Ottoman Turkish keyboard typewriters.
Some Turkish reformists promoted the adoption of the Latin script well before Atatürk's reforms. In 1862, during an earlier period of reform, the statesman Münuf Pasha advocated a reform of the alphabet. At the start of the 20th century similar proposals were made by several writers associated with the Young Turks movement, including Hüseyin Cahit, Abdullah Cevdet, and Celâl Nuri. The issue was raised again in 1923 during the first Economic Congress of the newly founded Turkish Republic, sparking a public debate that was to continue for several years.
A move away from the Arabic script was strongly opposed by conservative and religious elements. It was argued that Romanisation of the script would detach Turkey from the wider Islamic world, substituting a "foreign" concept of national identity for the traditional sacred community. Others opposed Romanisation on practical grounds; at that time there was no suitable adaptation of the Latin script that could be used for Turkish phonemes. Some suggested that a better alternative might be to modify the Arabic script to introduce extra characters to better represent Turkish vowels. In 1926, however, the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in Turkey.
Turkish-speaking Armenians used the Mesrobian script to write the Bible and other books in Turkish for centuries. Karamanli Turkish was, similarly, written with a form of the Greek alphabet.
Atatürk himself had a longstanding conviction that the Turkish alphabet should be Latinised. He told Ruşen Eşref that he had been preoccupied with this idea during his time in Syria, and would later use a French-influenced Latinised rendering of Turkish in his private correspondence, as well as confide in Halide Edip in 1922 about his vision for a new alphabet. An early Latinisation of the Turkish language was made by Gyula Németh in his Türkische Grammatik, published in 1917, which had significant variations from the current script, for example using the Greek gamma where today's ğ would be used. Hagop Martayan brought this to Mustafa Kemal's attention in the initial years after the book's publication but Kemal did not like this transcription. The encounter with Martayan and looking at Németh's transcription represented the first instance where Kemal would see a systematically Latinised version of Turkish.