Turkish Alphabet: ç ğ ı İ ö ş ü, Law 1353 and TDK Spelling

What did Law 1353 require of the Turkish alphabet, and by when?

Law 1353 (opens in a new tab), accepted on 1 November 1928, replaced the Arabic letters used to write Turkish. In their place came letters "taken from the Latin basis". A table attached to the law draws them. The table shows every letter four times: capital and small, as print type and as handwriting. The articles after it set a deadline for each part of public life.

Each row paraphrases one or more articles.

From or until	What the law says	Article
publication, 3 November 1928	offices, companies and associations must accept documents in the new letters	2
1 December 1928	signs, notices, advertisements, cinema text, newspapers and magazines in Turkish use them	4
1 January 1929	latest date for state business, for Turkish books and for banks and companies	3, 5, 8
1 June 1929	last day to hand in a petition in Arabic letters; deeds and civil records switch	3, 4
1 June 1930	end of Arabic letters as shorthand in minutes, and of old printed forms	6, 8
no date	schools teach in Turkish letters; lessons from books in the old letters are banned	9

The law fixed the letters. It did not name them, and it said nothing about the circumflex. The Turkish Language Association, TDK, rules on both, as the last sections of this page show.

Why does the Turkish alphabet law put İ before I, while software puts ı first?

The table of Law 1353 lists İ i before I ı. The alphabet grid at the top of this page puts ı first. It follows the CLDR Turkish collation (opens in a new tab), the order software uses. AccentPad's data check compared the two lists on 2026-10-10. They hold the same letters, and only i and ı trade places.

What does ğ, the Turkish soft g, do in a word?

The letter ğ changes the vowel beside it instead of adding a sound of its own. Wiktionary's entry for ğ (opens in a new tab) calls it the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet, named yumuşak ge (opens in a new tab), soft ge. It notes that ğ cannot begin a word. The breve marks a g that was dropped. The G with accent page sets ğ beside the other g letters with a mark.

What you hear depends on where ğ stands. The words and transcriptions below come from Wiktionary's entries for dağ (opens in a new tab), yağmur (opens in a new tab), ağaç (opens in a new tab), çocuk (opens in a new tab) and ayak (opens in a new tab).

Where ğ stands	Word	Meaning	Said	What ğ does
end of the word	dağ	mountain	/ˈdaː/	lengthens the a
before a consonant	yağmur	rain	/jɑːˈmur/	lengthens the a
between two vowels	ağaç	tree	/aˈat͡ʃ/	leaves the vowels side by side
made from k before a suffix	çocuk, çocuğu	child, the child	/t͡ʃoˈd͡ʒuk/ for çocuk	marks a k that softened

The last row is where many ğ letters come from. A word that ends in k often turns it into ğ before a vowel suffix. So çocuk becomes çocuğu, and ayak, foot, becomes ayağı.

Why do Turkish abbreviations keep a hard k where words write ğ?

TDK's rules on abbreviations (opens in a new tab) say that a final k stays hard when a suffix follows. So the rules write RTÜK'e and TÜBİTAK'ın, and name RTÜĞ'e and TÜBİTAĞ'ın as wrong.

The same page gives one exception. Abbreviations built on the word birlik may soften in speech. ÇUKOBİRLİK'e is written with a k and said as ÇUKOBİRLİĞE.

What are the names of the Turkish alphabet letters?

Turkish names a vowel by its own sound and a consonant by its sound plus e. Wiktionary's list of Turkish letter names runs a, be, ce, çe, de and on to ve, ye, ze. The one exception is ğ, called yumuşak ge. Wiktionary's entry for ke (opens in a new tab) adds that many people say ka for K. It marks that form as proscribed.

So the Turkish alphabet letters are spelled aloud with e: TDK is te, de, ke. That habit matters in writing, as the next section shows.

Why does TDK write TDK'den and not TDK'dan?

TDK's rule for abbreviations in capitals is that the suffix follows how the last letter is read. The last letter of TDK is K, read ke. So the ending takes its e form: TDK'den. Read the K as ka and the same rule would give TDK'dan.

Turkish endings match the last vowel heard. Wiktionary's entry for de (opens in a new tab) states the pattern: da after a, ı, o or u, and de after e, i, ö or ü. Every consonant name ends in e. So a spelled-out abbreviation takes the e forms.

Abbreviation	Last letter, read as	Form TDK writes
BDT	te	BDT'ye
TDK	ke	TDK'den
THY	ye	THY'de
TL	le	TL'nin
NATO	read as one word	NATO'dan

NATO is the control. It is said as a word ending in o, so it takes the a form. TDK gives ASELSAN'da, BOTAŞ'ın and UNESCO'ya under the same rule. Small-letter abbreviations follow the whole word instead: cm'yi for santimetre, kg'dan for kilogram.

When does Turkish spelling need â, î or û?

TDK's page on the düzeltme işareti (opens in a new tab), the circumflex, gives three uses. The mark sits on a long vowel to separate words that are otherwise spelled alike. It marks a soft g or k before a or u in some Arabic and Persian loanwords. And it carries the î of a relational suffix.

These pairs are TDK's own examples.

Without the mark	Meaning	With the mark	Meaning
adet	number, piece	âdet	custom, habit
alem	flag	âlem	world, universe
hala	father's sister	hâlâ	still, yet
hal	market hall for produce	hâl	state, condition
askeri, as in Türk askeri	the soldier of the Turks	askerî, as in askerî okul	military, as in military school

For the loanwords, TDK lists kâğıt, dükkân and hikâye, and the name Kâzım. The last row of the table is the third use. There the î turns askeri, a noun with a possessive ending, into the adjective askerî.

TDK also records drift. Katil, killer, and kadir, mighty, are now often written with no mark, even where they can be confused.

Are â, î and û letters of the Turkish alphabet?

No. The vowels â, î and û carry a mark, but they are not letters of the Turkish alphabet. They are missing from the table of Law 1353. Unicode CLDR files them as auxiliary letters for Turkish. They are listed further down, beside the q, w and x of foreign names.

Software follows suit. We sorted and searched with the Turkish collator in Node.js v26.0.0 (ICU 78.3, CLDR 48) on 2026-10-10. The sort ran hal, hâl, hala, hâlâ, halı. Each marked word came right after its plain twin, with no section of its own. A search that ignores accents matched hâlâ with hala and âdet with adet. As a control, the same search kept çam apart from cam, because ç is a letter.

So the mark is spelling, not a letter. In the pairs above it still changes the word. If your keyboard lacks a circumflex, the A, I and U keys further down lead to â, î and û. For the letters of the alphabet itself, the Turkish keyboard draws the Q and F layouts and types ğ, ı, İ and ş in one click.