The grammar that turns English inside out

The alphabet does what it promises: once you know the six new letters, every word reads as it is written. The grammar is a different matter, because Turkish is built on a plan unrelated to any European language, and a few of its habits reach a traveller on day one.

The verb comes last, and the prepositions are endings. Turkish says ben çay istiyorum — I tea want. There is no word for to or from; they are glued onto the noun: İstanbul'dan Ankara'ya is from Istanbul to Ankara. Bus fronts and road signs use the same endings, so Otogar'a on a minibus means it is going to the bus station, and recognising the name inside the word is all you need.

Turkish leaves out a great deal that English insists on. There is no gender at all — o means he, she and it alike — and no word for the. After a number, a noun stays singular: two teas is iki çay, never iki çaylar, which makes ordering pleasantly easy. Questions are made with a separate little word, mi, which changes its vowel to match the word before it — mı, mi, mu, mü — and whose tune you will soon hear everywhere.

Two words do the work of a phrasebook. Var means there is, yok means there isn't, and with mı on the end they become the most useful questions in the language. Su var mı? — is there water? Yok — there isn't. Yok also does duty as no, no way, and don't even think about it, depending on the eyebrows that go with it.

Turkish grammar records how you know something. A past event gets one ending if you saw it and another if you only heard about it or found out afterwards: otobüs kalktı is the bus left, and I watched it go; otobüs kalkmış is the bus has left, apparently — you arrived to an empty stop. You will not need to produce this as a visitor, but you will hear the -miş constantly, and now you know why so much Turkish news and gossip seems to be told at one remove.

A language built from the end of the word

Turkish is one of the easiest languages in the world to read aloud and one of the hardest to follow by ear, and the reason is the same in both cases: almost all of the meaning lives at the end of the word. Turkish builds by stacking. Ev is a house, evler is houses, evlerim is my houses, evlerimde is in my houses — one word where English needs four. A sentence is a short row of long words, and the part you need is usually the last syllable or two of each. The listening skill worth building is patience: wait for the tail of the word before you decide what it meant.

The word to drill is the long thank-you. Teşekkür ederim is six syllables, te-şek-kür e-de-rim, and English speakers trip on the middle, where the double k is genuinely held for an extra beat and the ü wants rounded lips. Say it slowly until it runs, then learn the two short cousins that most people actually use with each other: teşekkürler, a touch more casual, and sağ ol, said sah-OHL, which is what you will hear from the man who hands you your tea.

Six things that catch visitors out

No is a head tilted back. A quick upward jerk of the chin, with raised eyebrows and often a click of the tongue — tsk — means no, and it is easily mistaken for a nod. Shaking the head from side to side, on the other hand, usually does not mean no at all: it means I don't understand, or what do you mean? If a shopkeeper shakes his head at your question, try asking it another way.

The host pays, and fights you for it. Splitting a bill among friends is uncommon, and when someone has invited you, the bill is theirs; hesap bende, the bill is mine, is said with feeling. A visitor's polite struggle is expected and will be lost. The right response is to accept graciously and return the favour another time, not to slip the waiter your card.

Hold out your hands for the cologne. On long-distance buses, in restaurants after a meal and in homes when guests arrive, someone may come round with a bottle of kolonya, a lemon-scented cologne, and splash some into your cupped hands. Rub it over your hands and, if you like, your face and neck. It is a welcome and a refresher, and declining it is odd.

Bread is not thrown away. Bread comes free and fresh with almost every meal and is treated with a respect that surprises visitors: many people will not let it fall to the floor, and an older person who sees a piece dropped in the street may pick it up and set it on a wall, out of the way of feet. Take what you will eat rather than leaving a half-eaten basket.

Do not drink the last of the coffee. Turkish coffee is boiled with its grounds and served unfiltered, and the bottom third of the cup is a thick sludge. Sip until you feel it, then stop. Afterwards someone may turn the cup upside down on its saucer to cool, and read your future in the patterns the grounds leave — kahve falı — which is entertainment, friendship and a little bit of belief, all at once.

In a hamam, the cloth stays on. In a traditional bathhouse, men and women bathe separately — in separate buildings or at separate hours — and you are given a peştemal, a thin checked cotton wrap, which stays round you throughout. You lie on the warm central marble, and an attendant scrubs you with a rough glove, a kese, harder than you thought skin could take, then buries you in soap foam. Tip the attendant directly.

English in the resorts, Turkish everywhere else

In Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu in Istanbul, along the Antalya coast and in Bodrum, English is easy to find, alongside German and Russian, which the resorts serve just as much. Step outside the places that live on tourism and it falls away quickly. Türkiye sits towards the bottom of Europe's English-proficiency tables, and in an Anatolian town, on a dolmuş minibus, at a pharmacy or in a neighbourhood bakery, Turkish is the language, and a visitor who has a few words of it is treated very differently from one who has none.

The country's name in English is one of the things you will notice first. In 2022 the government asked the United Nations and the world to use Türkiye, the name Turks have always used, and it is now on passports, airline screens and official signs. Using it costs nothing and is noticed.

What a few words of Turkish buy is out of all proportion to their difficulty. Hospitality here is close to an obligation — a guest, misafir, is someone you look after — and a visitor who tries the language becomes a guest rather than a customer. Expect a tea you did not order, a question about where you are from, and quite possibly an invitation. The short phrases in this kit are the key to that door; nobody expects grammar.

Bey, Hanım, and the words for other people's luck

Respect goes after the first name. Turkish adds its sir and madam not to the surname but to the first name: Ahmet Bey, Ayşe Hanım. It is how you address a hotel owner, a landlord, an older colleague or the pharmacist whose name is on the door — formal and warm at once. A teacher, a doctor or anyone who knows more than you about something is hocam, my teacher, and the man who cooks your kebab, drives your minibus or fixes your shoe is usta, master, said with real respect.

Turkish has a set phrase for almost every situation, and using them is most of politeness. A server or host says afiyet olsun as food arrives, roughly may it do you good. After a home-cooked meal you say elinize sağlık — health to your hands — to whoever cooked it, and it is one of the most appreciated things a guest can say. To someone who is ill, or has had a bad day, or a car accident, you say geçmiş olsun, may it pass. And to anyone at work as you walk into their shop, kolay gelsin, may it come easy.

Goodbye depends on who is leaving. The person going says hoşça kal, stay well; the person staying says güle güle, which means go smiling. Getting them the right way round is a small thing that marks you immediately as someone who has listened.

Religion is woven into everyday speech whatever a speaker believes. İnşallah, if God wills it, goes on the end of almost any plan; maşallah goes after a compliment to protect it from the evil eye; Allah'a şükür, thank God, is the answer to how are you on a good day. They are habits of the language, as automatic as English goodbye, and nobody minds a visitor using them.

Istanbul is not the capital, and the Black Sea is not the Aegean

Istanbul is the city everyone knows, but the capital since 1923 has been Ankara, deliberately chosen in the middle of Anatolia as the seat of the new republic. The two cities feel little alike: Istanbul sprawling, mercantile and endlessly old, Ankara orderly, governmental and proud of being new. İzmir, on the Aegean, is a third character again — the most relaxed and secular of the big cities, with a seafront promenade and a reputation for treating its visitors as neighbours.

The Black Sea coast in the north is green, wet and mountainous, and much of Türkiye's tea grows on terraces above Rize. Its people have a fast, distinctive accent, a passion for hamsi, the small Black Sea anchovy, cooked dozens of ways, and the honour of being the heroes of a whole national genre of jokes — the Temel fıkraları, starring a quick-talking Black Sea man called Temel, which Black Sea people tell about themselves better than anyone.

In the south-east the country changes again. Millions of people there speak Kurdish at home, and near the Syrian border Arabic too; Mardin's honey-coloured stone town looks out over the Mesopotamian plain. This is also Türkiye's great food region: Gaziantep, recognised by UNESCO as a city of gastronomy, makes the pistachio baklava the rest of the country measures itself against, and Şanlıurfa gives its name to the smoky dried pepper, isot, that turns up on tables nationwide.

The interior moves at a slower and more conservative pace than the coasts. Cappadocia is a world of its own, with cave churches and dawn balloon flights; Konya, the city of the poet Rumi and the whirling dervishes, is among the most devout cities in the country. Dress and behaviour that pass unnoticed in an Istanbul bar district stand out here, and a little more covering goes a long way.

Türkiye, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Ağrı Dağı, called Mount Ararat in English, is a dormant volcano in the far east that rises past 5,000 metres and keeps a permanent cap of ice.
• The night before a wedding the bride's hands are hennaed at a kına gecesi, while the women sing songs meant to make her cry and a coin is pressed into her palm first.
• Turkish has no grammatical gender: the single pronoun o covers he, she and it, and neither the noun nor the adjective changes to match.
• Geçmiş olsun means may it be past, and it is offered for anything unpleasant at all: an illness, a hard exam, a long flight that has only just landed.
• The bağlama, a long-necked lute with movable frets, is the backbone of Anatolian folk song, and its frets sit at intervals a piano cannot reach.
• When someone sets off on a journey, water is poured on the road behind them with the wish git gel, go and come back, so that the trip runs as smoothly as the water.
• Yakamoz is one word for the glitter of moonlight on the surface of the sea, and it covers the glow of plankton stirred up in dark water too.
• In the Mevlevi sema danced in Konya, the turning figure holds the right palm upward and the left palm down, taking in from above and passing it on to the ground.
• The first coins were struck in Lydia, in the west of the country, from electrum, a natural gold and silver alloy panned out of the Paktolos river.
• The Bosphorus carries two currents at once, brackish water running south from the Black Sea along the surface and saltier Mediterranean water sliding north underneath it.
• Tuz Gölü, the salt lake on the central plateau, is enormous and in places only ankle-deep; much of it dries out each summer into a crust that is harvested for table salt.
• Göbekli Tepe near Şanlıurfa is a set of rings of carved stone pillars raised roughly 11,000 years ago, before pottery, farming or the wheel.
• Underneath Kapadokya lie carved-out cities such as Derinkuyu, cut many levels deep with ventilation shafts, wells and round stone doors that could be rolled shut across a passage from the inside.
• At Kırkpınar in Edirne, wrestlers in leather kispet trousers douse themselves in olive oil and grapple on grass, a tournament whose recorded history reaches back to the 14th century.
• Baklava from Gaziantep holds a protected-origin label under the name Antep baklavası, and it is built on the green pistachios grown around that city.
• English borrowed kiosk from köşk, an open garden pavilion, and yogurt from yoğurt, whose silent letter ğ makes no sound of its own and simply stretches the vowel before it.
• 23 April is a national holiday handed over to children, and schools send pupils to sit for the day in the chairs of mayors, governors and ministers.
• On the Black Sea coast the anchovy, hamsi, ends up in everything from cornbread to rice pilaf, and it has its own folk songs written about it.
• Someone scratched Norse runes into a marble parapet in the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia, most likely a Varangian guardsman with time on his hands.
• The cherry takes its name from Kerasous, the Black Sea town now called Giresun, from which a Roman general is said to have carried the cultivated tree back west.
• The Kangal, a guardian dog bred around Sivas, lives out among the flock rather than herding it, and wears a spiked iron collar so a wolf cannot reach its throat.
• The vertical döner spit was worked out in 19th-century Bursa, and İskender kebap — the slices laid over bread with tomato and browned butter — carries the name of the man credited with it.
• Ayran is nothing but yoghurt, water and salt whisked until it foams, and it is the standard thing to order alongside a plate of grilled meat.
• Mimar Sinan served as chief architect to three sultans, designed hundreds of buildings, and regarded the Selimiye mosque in Edirne, finished when he was in his eighties, as his masterwork.
• Father Christmas began as Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra on the Mediterranean coast, beside the town known today as Demre.
• Mantı are dumplings roughly the size of a fingernail, served under garlic yoghurt and hot butter, and a Kayseri saying holds that a good cook fits forty of them on one spoon.
• The name İstanbul is thought to come from a Greek phrase, eis tin polin, into the city — what people said when they were heading there.
• Lake Van is so alkaline that laundry can be washed in it without soap, and the one fish that thrives there, the inci kefalı, runs up freshwater streams to spawn.
• Turkish stacks endings onto a root, so what English needs a phrase for can arrive as a single word: evlerimizden means from our houses.
• Pamukkale means cotton castle, and the name fits: hot springs cooling as they run downhill have left calcium behind for millennia, building a hillside of white terraces.
• Gas seeping from the rock at Yanartaş, above the coastal village of Çıralı, burns in open flames that have been alight for thousands of years; ancient sailors knew the spot as the Chimaera and steered by it.
• Çatalhöyük was a Neolithic town of mudbrick houses packed wall to wall with no streets at all: people walked across the roofs and climbed down a ladder into their homes.
• The word mausoleum comes from the tomb built for Mausolus at Halikarnassos, the city now called Bodrum, and counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world.
• Tea arrives in a tulip-shaped glass called ince belli, thin-waisted, gripped by the cool rim so the hand is spared while the tea stays scalding.
• Turkish coffee is boiled rather than brewed: grounds and water go into a long-handled pot called a cezve together, and the cup is poured with the sediment still in it, which is why the last mouthful is left behind.
• Turkish carpets are tied with a symmetrical knot looped around two warp threads, which gives a sturdy, hard-wearing pile, while the asymmetric knot used further east allows finer detail.
• The compliment paid to a cook is elinize sağlık, health to your hands, and the cook answers with afiyet olsun, may it do you good.
• Storks and birds of prey funnel over the Bosphorus in their thousands every autumn, because they ride rising air over land and avoid crossing open sea wherever they can.
• Şalgam suyu is a tart, deep-purple drink of fermented turnip and black carrot, poured by the glass in Adana alongside grilled meat and ordered either plain or acılı, with chilli.
• The alphabet holds two separate letters, dotted i and dotless ı, with two different sounds — and the capital of the dotted one keeps its dot, written İ.
• Nearly all the country's tea grows on the steep, rain-soaked slopes around Rize on the Black Sea coast, where the leaf is picked by hand.
• The Van cat is a chalk-white breed known for odd eyes, one amber and one blue, and for an unusual willingness to get into water and swim.
• The blue glass eye, nazar boncuğu, is pinned to babies' clothes, hung in taxis and set into house walls; when one cracks, the household takes it as the charm having done its work.
• Turkish delight is lokum at home, from rahat-ül hulkum, comfort of the throat; it is set with starch and sugar rather than gelatin, so it is chewy instead of springy.
• Kolay gelsin, may it come easy, is said to anyone caught working — a shopkeeper, a road crew, a colleague picking up the phone.
• Askıda ekmek, bread on the hook, is the habit of paying a baker for an extra loaf in advance so that whoever needs one can simply ask for it later.
• Suffixes bend to fit the word they attach to, a rule called vowel harmony, so the plural of ev, house, is evler while the plural of kitap, book, is kitaplar.
• Simit, the sesame ring sold from red carts, is dipped in diluted grape molasses before it meets the sesame, which is what gives the crust its dark shine.
• Maraş dondurma is thickened with salep, ground from wild orchid tubers, and with mastic resin, so it stretches like dough and is often eaten with a knife and fork.
• Behind the Black Sea coast the Kaçkar mountains climb from dripping forest to glaciers, and families still move their animals up to the yayla, the high summer pastures, once the snow clears.
• Tulip and turban both trace back to tülbent, the word for muslin, after the wound headcloth the flower's shape was said to resemble.
• Four seas touch the coast — the Black Sea, the Marmara, the Aegean and the Mediterranean — and the Marmara lies wholly inside the country, named after the marble quarried on its islands.
• Karagöz and Hacivat are shadow puppets cut from translucent hide, one blunt and unschooled, the other fond of long words, and their arguments have kept the same comic timing for centuries.
• A proper kahvaltı covers the whole table with small plates: white cheese, olives, tomato, cucumber, honey poured over clotted kaymak, and bread that keeps arriving warm.
• Genetic work traces domesticated einkorn wheat to wild stands still growing on the Karacadağ hills in the southeast, which makes the region a birthplace of bread.
• Grammar marks where the news came from: one past tense says the speaker saw it happen, another says they only heard about it, so hearsay is built into the verb ending.
• In Kapadokya, ash from old volcanoes hardened into rock soft enough to erode into tapering pillars called fairy chimneys, and people hollowed houses, stables and chapels straight into them.
• The Hittites ruled central Anatolia from Hattuşa, and a clay tablet from their archives records one of the earliest known peace treaties; a copy of it hangs at the United Nations.
• The centre of a hamam is a heated slab of marble called the göbek taşı, the navel stone, where bathers lie and sweat for a while before anyone is scrubbed.
• The Kapalıçarşı in Istanbul has been trading since the 1460s and grew into a covered maze of thousands of shops with its own named streets, gates and fountains.