How to Say “When” in Turkish: -dığında, -dığı sırada, -dıkça, -dığı sürece

To ask “when?” in Turkish, you generally use ne zaman. To join two events, as in “when I got home, my mother was asleep”, Turkish uses no separate word: it adds a suffix to the verb, most often -dığında.

In this article, you will learn how to build -dığında for every person and how it compares with -dığı zaman and -ınca. You will also learn the forms for “while”, “just as”, “whenever”, “the more… the more” and “as long as”. Finally, you will see where the clause sits and four typical mistakes English speakers make with these forms. Haydi başlayalım!

Why Ne Zaman Cannot Join Two Clauses

Ne zaman means “when?” and opens a question. It behaves like the other question words you meet in our guide to asking questions in Turkish. Turkish time clauses do not start with a conjunction placed in front of them. Instead, the verb of the time clause takes a suffix, and the main clause follows.

• Ne zaman geldin? (When did you come?)
• Sen geldiğinde ben uyuyordum. (When you came, I was asleep.)

Ne zaman keeps its question meaning inside a longer sentence, in an indirect question such as “tell me when you will arrive”. The verb after it takes -dık for a past or present event and -acak for a future one, the same suffixes you will meet in the sections below. A person ending and the accusative -ı follow, because the whole question is the object of the main verb.

• Çıkmadan önce ne zaman varacağını söyle. (Before you leave, tell me when you will arrive.)
• Ne zaman döneceğimi bilmiyorum. (I don’t know when I’ll be back.)

To tell the two uses apart, replace “when” with “at what time”. If the sentence still works, as in “tell me at what time you will arrive”, use ne zaman. If it does not, as in “when I got home, my mother was asleep”, use a suffix such as -dığında.

One pattern does let ne zaman link two clauses: ne zaman followed by a verb in the conditional -sa. The pair means “whenever”, and other words can stand between the two. For repeated events in the past, the verb takes -dıysa instead.

• Ne zaman arasam telefonun kapalı. (Whenever I call, your phone is off.)
• Ne zaman bu şarkıyı dinlesem duygulanıyorum. (Whenever I listen to this song, I get emotional.)
• Ne zaman aradıysam telefonun kapalıydı. (Whenever I called, your phone was off.)

The Engine Behind Most “When” Clauses in Turkish

Most forms in this article share one mechanism. The verb takes the suffix -dık, which turns the action into something close to a noun, “the fact of coming”. A possessive ending then says who acts, exactly as it does on a noun such as evim (my house). Last comes either the locative case -da (at) or a time word.

So geldiğimde breaks down as gel- (come) + -diğ + -im (my) + -de (at): literally “at my coming”. The dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) defines a zarf-fiil (converb) as a word built from a verb and used as an adverb. The suffixes it names include -arak, -dıkça, -ınca and -madan. Those are single suffixes and take no person ending. The -dık forms are chains of several suffixes, which is why they always show who acts.

The following table shows how one engine produces six different meanings (only the last piece changes).

Form	Last piece	Literal sense	Meaning
-dığında	-da (at)	at the time of my doing	when
-dığı zaman	zaman (time)	the time that I do	when
-dığı sırada	sırada (at the moment)	at the moment that I do	while, just when
-dığı anda	anda (in the instant)	in the instant that I do	the moment
-dığı sürece	sürece (for the stretch)	for the stretch that I do	as long as
-dığından beri	-dan beri (since)	since my doing	since

Sound Changes and Person Endings

The suffix -dık changes shape in three ways. Its vowel follows four-way vowel harmony: -dık, -dik, -duk, -dük. Its d turns into t after a voiceless consonant, one of the letters in the memory phrase fıstıkçı şahap, following consonant harmony, which gives baktığımda and gittiğimde. Its final k softens to ğ before a vowel, so you write geldiğimde. The ğ is silent: geldiğimde sounds close to “gel-dee-im-deh”.

Person	gelmek (to come)	bakmak (to look)	English
ben	geldiğimde	baktığımda	when I come / look
sen	geldiğinde	baktığında	when you come / look
o	geldiğinde	baktığında	when he or she comes / looks
biz	geldiğimizde	baktığımızda	when we come / look
siz	geldiğinizde	baktığınızda	when you (plural) come / look
onlar	geldiklerinde	baktıklarında	when they come / look

Two cells look identical: geldiğinde means both “when you come” and “when he or she comes”. Context usually settles it; when it does not, put sen or o in front. In the plural the k stays, because the next letter is a consonant. A noun subject keeps its bare form: telefon çaldığında (when the phone rang). For the negative, insert -ma or -me before -dık: gelmediğimde (when I don’t come), bakmadığında (when he doesn’t look).

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-dığında: The Everyday “When”

-dığında has no tense of its own. The verb at the end of the sentence decides whether you talk about the past, a habit or the future. In a story, the main verb usually sits in the past tense:

• Ben bağırdığımda maymun daha da yukarı çıktı. (When I shouted, the monkey climbed even higher.)
• Annem aradığında yemek yapıyordum. (When my mother called, I was cooking.)

The second sentence shows an action already under way when another one happened. For that kind of interrupted scene, pair -dığında with the past continuous in the main clause.

For habits and plans, the main verb changes and -dığında stays the same:

• Mesela ben uyandığımda yaptığım ilk şey telefona bakmak oluyor. (For example, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone.)
• Kore’ye gittiğimde sana haber veririm. (I will let you know when I go to Korea.)

The trip to Korea lies in the future, yet the “when” clause carries no future suffix. English works the same way: you say “when I go”, not “when I will go”. Put the future tense, or the aorist for a promise, on the main verb only.

Place her (every) before the clause and -dığında means “every time” or “whenever”:

• Ben her kitap okumaya karar verdiğimde kendimi TikTok izlerken buluyorum. (Every time I decide to read a book, I end up watching TikToks instead.)

-dığı zaman: The Same “When” in Two Words

-dığı zaman means the same as -dığında in most sentences. The noun zaman means “time”, so geldiğim zaman is literally “the time that I come”. The person ending sits on -dık, and zaman never changes.

Because zaman is a separate word, the third person needs no buffer n. As a result, geldiği zaman (when he comes) and geldiğin zaman (when you come) stay distinct, and the two-word form avoids the geldiğinde ambiguity.

• Yorgun olduğum zaman erken yatarım. (When I’m tired, I go to bed early.)
• Annen geldiği zaman bana haber ver. (Let me know when your mother comes.)

For something a person is about to do, replace -dık with the future participle -acak, which softens to -acağ before a vowel:

• Çıkacağın zaman beni ara. (Call me when you are about to leave.)

-(y)ınca: “When” With a Built-In Order

-(y)ınca is the shortest way to say “when”. It follows four-way vowel harmony (-ınca, -ince, -unca, -ünce) and takes a buffer y after a vowel, as in okuyunca and bekleyince. As a true converb, it never takes a person ending; a pronoun or the context shows who acts.

Its meaning is a sequence. The first action is complete, then the second one follows, much like English “once”.

• Eve gelince duş aldım. (When I got home, I took a shower.)
• Yağmur durunca dışarı çıkarız. (We’ll go out once the rain stops.)
• Siz gelmeyince gittik. (When you didn’t come, we left.)

The third sentence is the example TDK gives in its entry for zarf-fiil. In this negative form, time and cause blend: the absence of the others is also the reason for leaving. You will also meet gelince in a fixed phrase with the dative: bana gelince means “as for me”.

-ınca or -dığında? What a Corpus of 9,000 Clauses Shows

For a finished event followed by another, both forms work. Eve gelince and eve geldiğimde can both open “When I got home, I took a shower.” They part ways when the events overlap, or when the main event happened first.

A 2024 study by Doğan Baydal and Emine Yarar analysed 9,000 time clauses from the Turkish National Corpus (Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Letters). That corpus holds 50 million words of spoken and written Turkish from 1990 to 2013. The authors class -ınca as marking only an event that comes first. -dığında and -dığı zaman, in contrast, can mark an event that comes first, one that runs at the same time, or one that comes later. Their samples of 1,000 clauses each break down as follows.

Form	Clause event comes first	Same time	Clause event comes later
-dığında	805	74	121
-dığı zaman	826	110	64

In practice, use -ınca when English “once” or “as soon as” fits. When the two events overlap, or the main event came first, choose -dığında:

• İstasyona vardığımızda tren çoktan kalkmıştı. (When we reached the station, the train had already left.)
• Koşmaya başladığımda etraftaki herkes bana bakıyordu. (When I started running, everyone around was staring at me.)

Where the “When” Clause Goes

Turkish places the time clause before the main clause and keeps the main verb at the end, in line with general Turkish word order. The same study confirms it: 8,003 of its 9,000 clauses, about 89%, came before the main clause, with almost identical shares in speech and writing.

• İspanya’da yılbaşında saat tam on ikiyi gösterdiğinde, her çan sesiyle birlikte bir üzüm yenir. (In Spain, when the clock strikes exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve, one grape is eaten with each bell chime.)

Build your sentences in that order: time clause first, then the main clause, then the main verb.

-dığı sırada and -acağı sırada: “While” and “Just As”

The noun sıra means “row” or “turn”, and TDK also gives it the sense of the time that coincides with an event. -dığı sırada uses that sense: “at the moment that”. Use it when one event happens in the middle of another.

• Ben ne olduğunu anlamaya çalıştığım sırada maymun ağaca tırmanmaya başladı. (While I was trying to understand what was happening, the monkey started climbing a tree.)
• Biz yemek yediğimiz sırada elektrikler kesildi. (While we were eating, the power went out.)

The suffix -ken (while) covers similar ground with no person ending at all. The guide to Turkish gerunds explains it in detail.

Replace -dık with the future participle -acak and you get -acağı sırada, “just as someone was about to”. The word tam (just, exactly) often comes first.

• Tam umudumu kaybedeceğim sırada bir görevli geldi. (Just as I was about to lose hope, an attendant came.)
• Tam evden çıkacağım sırada yağmur başladı. (Just as I was about to leave the house, it started to rain.)

For “the moment that”, use -dığı anda. TDK defines an as a piece of time too short to divide, which is exactly the sense here:

• Beni gördüğü anda gülümsedi. (The moment she saw me, she smiled.)

-dıkça: “Whenever” and “The More… The More”

-dıkça (-dikçe, -dukça, -dükçe, and -tıkça, -tikçe, -tukça, -tükçe after a voiceless consonant) is a converb, so like -ınca it takes no person ending. It has two readings, and the main clause tells you which one applies.

The first reading is repetition: each time the first action happens, the second follows.

• Bu şarkıyı duydukça seni hatırlıyorum. (Whenever I hear this song, I think of you.)

The second reading is gradual change: as the first action continues or grows, the second changes with it. The word daha (more) in the main clause makes this reading explicit, as shown in the guide to comparatives in Turkish.

• Ama zaman geçtikçe buna alıştım. (But as time passed, I got used to it.)
• Ben haberlere baktıkça moralim bozuluyor! (The more I look at the news, the worse I feel.)
• Türkçe konuştukça daha rahat hissedeceksin. (The more you speak Turkish, the more comfortable you will feel.)

One -dıkça form has become an adverb in its own right. TDK lists gittikçe, literally “as it goes”, with the meaning “gradually, more and more”:

• Hava gittikçe soğuyor. (The weather is getting colder and colder.)

The negative -madıkça works in two ways. With a comparison, it means “the less”. With a negative main clause, it means “unless”.

• Telefona bakmadıkça kendimi daha özgür hissediyorum. (The less I look at my phone, the freer I feel.)
• Sen söylemedikçe kimse bilmeyecek. (Unless you tell them, nobody will know.)

-dığı sürece: “As Long As”

TDK defines süre as the stretch of time between the start and the end of an event, and sürece means “for that stretch”. -dığı sürece therefore sets a condition that has to keep holding: the main clause stays true for as long as the first one does. The person ending sits on -dık, as with zaman: çalıştığım sürece, çalıştığın sürece, çalıştığı sürece.

• Düzenli çalıştığın sürece Türkçen hızla gelişir. (As long as you study regularly, your Turkish improves quickly.)
• Ama paylaşmadığım sürece onun sadece bana ait olduğunu hissediyorum. (But as long as I don’t share it, I feel like it belongs only to me.)

TDK illustrates süre with a sentence built on this pattern: Hükümdar gibi davrandığınız sürece hükümdar sayılırsınız. (As long as you act like a ruler, you are counted as one.)

The difference from -dıkça lies in the logic. -dıkça tracks repetition or degree, more of one thing bringing more of another. -dığı sürece sets a condition that is either met or not. In the negative, the two come close: söylemedikçe and söylemediğin sürece both translate as “unless you tell”.

Before, After, Since and As Soon As

Five more time clauses complete the family. Each follows the patterns above, so a short reference is enough here.

• -madan önce (before): Yatmadan önce dişlerini fırçala. (Brush your teeth before you go to bed.) The guide to before and after in Turkish covers it in depth.
• -dıktan sonra (after): Yemek yedikten sonra yürüyüşe çıktık. (After eating, we went for a walk.)
• -dığından beri (since): Sosyal medyayı sildiğimden beri telefonumu çok daha az kullanıyorum. (Since I deleted social media, I’ve been using my phone much less.) For beri after a noun, see since and for in Turkish.
• -(y)alı (since, with no person ending): Mesela ben sosyal medyayı bırakalı beş kitap okudum ve sayısız yeni film izledim. (For example, since I quit social media, I’ve read five books and watched countless new movies.)
• -ır … -maz (as soon as): Eve gelir gelmez uyudum. (As soon as I got home, I fell asleep.)

Full Recap: Which “When” Do You Need?

Start from the English meaning, then pick the Turkish form. The third column tells you whether the form carries a person ending.

You want to say	Turkish form	Person ending	Example
when (past, habit or future)	-dığında / -dığı zaman	yes	eve geldiğimde
once, when (first X, then Y)	-(y)ınca	no	eve gelince
as soon as	-ır … -maz	no	eve gelir gelmez
while	-ken	no	eve gelirken
while, at the moment that	-dığı sırada	yes	eve geldiğim sırada
just as (about to)	-acağı sırada	yes	tam çıkacağım sırada
the moment that	-dığı anda	yes	beni gördüğü anda
whenever, every time	her + -dığında / -dıkça	yes / no	her geldiğimde, geldikçe
whenever (any time)	ne zaman + -sa	yes	ne zaman gelsem
the more… the more	-dıkça + daha	no	okudukça daha
as long as	-dığı sürece	yes	çalıştığın sürece
unless	-madıkça	no	sen söylemedikçe
since (an event)	-dığından beri / -(y)alı	yes / no	taşındığımdan beri
tell me / I don’t know when	ne zaman + -dığını / -acağını	yes	ne zaman varacağını

Common Mistakes With “When” in Turkish

The sentences struck through below are incorrect, so do not copy them. Each one sits directly above its correction.

Using the question word as a conjunction is the most natural error for an English speaker:

• Ne zaman eve geldim, annem uyuyordu. (wrong: ne zaman joins two clauses only with -sa, and then it means “whenever”)
• Eve geldiğimde annem uyuyordu. (When I got home, my mother was asleep.)

Leaving a fully conjugated verb in front of zaman is the second:

• Eve geldim zaman duş aldım. (wrong: the verb before zaman needs -dık and a person ending)
• Eve geldiğim zaman duş aldım. (When I got home, I took a shower.)

The third is a person ending that does not match the subject:

• Ben eve geldiğinde seni ararım. (wrong: -ğinde is the “you” or “he/she” ending, not the one for ben)
• Ben eve geldiğimde seni ararım. (I’ll call you when I get home.)

The fourth mistake is forgetting to harden d to t after a voiceless consonant:

• Çalışdıkça daha iyi anlıyorum. (wrong: after ş, the suffix starts with t)
• Çalıştıkça daha iyi anlıyorum. (The more I study, the better I understand.)

Conclusion

Turkish has no single word for the “when” that joins two clauses. It offers a family of verb forms instead. The everyday -dığında and the quick -ınca carry most stories, -dığı sırada handles interruptions, -dıkça tracks repetition and growth, and -dığı sürece sets conditions. Learn the -dık + person engine once, and most of the family follows.

Listen for these endings in Turkish series and conversations: once you recognize -dığında, you will hear it in almost every story someone tells.

To practise them in real dialogues, with exercises that check your endings, try our app TurkishFluent.