{"id":1330,"date":"2026-10-27T15:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T15:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/turkishfluent.com\/blog\/?p=1330"},"modified":"2026-10-27T20:50:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T20:50:31","slug":"loanwords-in-turkish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/turkishfluent.com\/blog\/loanwords-in-turkish\/","title":{"rendered":"Loanwords in Turkish: What Turkish Borrowed from Arabic, French, Persian and English"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most people ignore it but Turkish has plenty of loanwords. The 2005 edition of the dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) counted about 14,800 words of foreign origin<\/strong>. Two languages supplied more than three quarters of them: Arabic<\/strong> with 6,463 words and French<\/strong> with 4,974. Persian, Italian and Greek come next. English, for all the ti\u015f\u00f6rt and futbol you see in Turkey, accounted for only 538.<\/p>\n\n\n

In this article, you will learn what each language gave Turkish and how to recognise its loanwords. You will see why so many “English” words in Turkish are in fact French and which loanwords changed meaning on the way. You will also recognize the Turkish words that resemble English ones by coincidence, like kayak<\/em>, which means skiing. Finally, you will learn the suffix rules that apply to borrowed words and to English names, where ordinary vowel harmony has exceptions. Hadi ba\u015flayal\u0131m!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Table of Contents<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n