English Pronunciation for Turkish Speakers

Turkish spelling is a gift to its readers: close to one letter per sound, so a word sounds the way it is written. English spelling is not, and Turkish speakers feel it twice. They meet sounds Turkish does not have, and they meet words whose letters do not say how to pronounce them.

The list of problem areas is short and regular. English has /θ/, /ð/ and /w/, and Turkish has none of them. English separates vowels Turkish keeps together, reduces most unstressed vowels to a weak schwa, starts words with clusters such as spr-, and puts the stress in places Turkish would not. This guide takes the areas one at a time, with what English does, what Turkish does instead, and a fix. The typical errors are the standard ones in teaching references such as Ian Thompson's chapter on Turkish speakers in Swan and Smith's Learner English; the facts about Turkish come from standard descriptions of its sound system (see Sources at the end). For a list in Turkish, see Türklerin İngilizce telaffuzda yaptığı yaygın hatalar.

About the transcriptions. Every table gives a US and a UK form from a pronunciation lexicon IPAtics maintains, printed exactly as it appears there. The US forms mark stress even in one-syllable words (thick is /ˈθɪk/) but not vowel length; the UK forms mark length with ː and often leave stress out. Both write English r as /ɹ/.

th: thick, not tick

Turkish has neither /θ/ nor /ð/, and Turkish speakers usually replace them with the nearest stops, /t/ and /d/. Thick becomes tick and they becomes day.

Turkish t and d close the mouth completely. /θ/ and /ð/ never close it. Put the tip of your tongue lightly between your teeth and blow: that is /θ/. Add your voice and it is /ð/. If the air stops for a moment, you have said t or d again. Our guide to the two TH sounds explains which words take which, and the pages on /θ/ and /ð/ have more example words.

w and v

Turkish has /v/ but no /w/, and its /v/ is not always the English one. Between two vowels, when one of them is rounded, Turkish /v/ is made with both lips and no friction, [β̞], so a Turkish word such as tavuk already has something close to an English w in it. Because the two sounds share one Turkish letter, they are easy to swap in both directions: west comes out as vest, and sometimes very as "wery".

English keeps the two apart by one thing: the upper teeth. For /v/, they rest on the lower lip and the air buzzes through. For /w/, the teeth stay out of it: round your lips as for Turkish u, then open them into the next vowel, u-est, west. A mirror settles it: teeth on the lip for every v, none for every w. The page on /w/ has more words.

ship and sheep: vowel length

Turkish has eight vowels, and in native words their length does not change the meaning. A long vowel turns up mainly where the letter ğ has stretched it, as in dağ. English pairs a long, tense vowel with a short, relaxed one, and the two are different words.

Turkish i is close to the vowel of sheep. For /ɪ/, do not just shorten it: relax the tongue and drop it slightly, toward Turkish e. The same goes for /ʊ/ in full: shorter, looser, with the lips only lightly rounded. Our list of English minimal pairs every learner confuses has more pairs.

cat and bed: you already have /æ/

Turkish has one e, but most speakers lower it toward [æ] before m, n, l or r at the end of a syllable. Say sen and ben: the vowel you hear is close to the English vowel of cat. In English, /æ/ and /ɛ/ are separate vowels that tell words apart, so the job is to use the sound you already make on purpose, in the right words.

For /æ/, open the jaw further than for ev and keep the tongue forward, as in your sen. Spelling is the guide: English /æ/ is almost always written a, and /ɛ/ is usually written e.

The schwa: the vowel English does not write

Turkish says every vowel it writes, at full value, stressed or not. English reduces most unstressed vowels to the schwa /ə/, a short, relaxed sound in the middle of the mouth, and sometimes drops them altogether. Reading English letter by letter, as Turkish spelling trains you to, gives each of those vowels too much weight.

The schwa is not a Turkish ı, which is higher and tenser, but ı said short and lazy, with the jaw a little lower, is a useful place to start. More important than the exact sound is its length: the schwa is brief. Our guide to the English schwa covers it in detail, including the small words such as to, for and and that reduce in every sentence.

Clusters: school, spring, train

Native Turkish words do not begin with two consonants. A few recent loanwords such as plan and program do, but speakers often add a vowel after the first consonant, and in some words the vowel made it into the spelling: French club became Turkish kulüp. Other loanwords gained a vowel in front, as istasyon did. English starts words with up to three consonants, and each added vowel adds a syllable the listener does not expect.

For clusters starting with s, begin with a long hiss, "sssss-kool", and shorten it until no vowel fits. Or lean on the word before: say my school as if it were mice + cool. Turkish syllables end in s all the time, so the /s/ closes the first syllable and leaves no room for a vowel. For tr, pl and kl, say the two consonants as one quick movement: the tongue is already moving toward the r or l while the t, p or k is released.

Word stress

Turkish puts the stress on the last syllable of most words, and it moves as suffixes are added. Place names, many loanwords and some suffixes are exceptions, but the default is the end. English has no default. The stress is part of each word, and it is often on the first syllable. Teachers commonly hear Turkish speakers move English stress toward the end of the word.

The UK entries leave stress unmarked, but it falls on the same syllable in both accents. Look at photograph and photography: the stress moves, and the vowel that loses it becomes schwa. Learn each word's stress with the word. The US column's stress mark tells you where it is.

Two smaller points: final consonants and the r

Turkish devoices b, d, c and g at the end of a word, and its spelling often shows it: kitap, but kitabı. English keeps them voiced, so bed and bet are different words. The clearest signal in English is the vowel, which is longer before a voiced consonant: stretch the vowel of bed /ˈbɛd/ and keep the one in bet /ˈbɛt/ short.

The Turkish r is a tap, and at the end of a word it is often devoiced into something like a soft hiss. The English /ɹ/ touches nothing: the tongue tip curls back slightly, the lips round a little, and the voice passes through. The page on the English r sound /ɹ/ has more words. If you learn British English, you drop the r whenever no vowel follows it, as in car /kɑː/; our comparison of American and British IPA shows where the two accents differ.

For teachers: what to drill first

1. th and w. They change words and are easy to hear. Use the mirror test for w and v.
2. The vowels. ship and sheep, then man and men, starting from the vowel of sen.
3. Schwa and stress, from the transcription. Your students trust spelling, so show them the IPA: a stress mark and a row of schwas do more than repeating the word.
4. Clusters. Count syllables with the class: school is one beat.
5. Final consonants and the r. Audible, but they rarely change which word the listener hears.

Our page for ESL teachers and tutors covers IPA worksheets and minimal-pair drills.

Trying it yourself

The words you meet every day are the practice. IPAtics is a desktop app that shows the IPA for any text you select, in any app, and plays the word, so you can check a vowel or a stress mark while you read. To convert text in the browser, paste it into the English to IPA converter, and the free IPA Anki decks include a deck of English minimal pairs. The guide for German speakers covers another group that mixes up w and v.

Sources

• Thompson, Ian. "Turkish speakers." In Michael Swan and Bernard Smith (eds.), Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 214–226. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667121.015.
• Wikipedia, "Turkish phonology": the eight vowels, length and ğ, the bilabial forms of /v/, /e/ lowered before m, n, l and r, clusters in loanwords and kulüp, final stress and its exceptions, final devoicing, and the tapped r.