Turkish Alphabet Reference

The complete Turkish alphabet

The modern Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, adopted in 1928 as a Latin-based script. It omits the letters Q, W, and X and adds six distinctive characters — ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü — plus the famous dotted-versus-dotless I distinction. This reference lists every letter with its uppercase and lowercase forms, its letter name, and its Unicode code points.

How it works

Each row shows a letter’s uppercase and lowercase glyphs, the Turkish name of the letter, and the Unicode code point for both forms (for example the dotless capital I is U+0049 while the dotted capital İ is U+0130). Use the filter checkbox to narrow the table to just the six special diacritic letters.

The six special letters and their roles:

• ç — c-cedilla, the “ch” sound
• ğ — yumuşak ge (soft g), lengthens the preceding vowel
• ı — dotless i, a back unrounded vowel
• ö — o-umlaut, a front rounded vowel
• ş — s-cedilla, the “sh” sound
• ü — u-umlaut, a front rounded vowel

The dotted and dotless I trap

Turkish keeps the dot distinction in both cases:

ı (dotless lower) -> I (plain upper)
i (dotted lower)  -> İ (dotted upper)

ASCII case conversion ignores this and corrupts Turkish text — turning istanbul into Istanbul instead of the correct İstanbul. Any software handling Turkish must use the tr-TR locale for case operations.

Tips and notes

• When building slugs or filenames, fold these letters to ASCII deliberately rather than relying on default normalization.
• The letter ğ never begins a word, so you will only ever see it mid- or end-word.
• Everything here is static reference data rendered in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.