Let’s be sure what is a possessive determiner:
Possessive determiners attribute possession to the objects. Some of them: Their, my, your etc.
In Turkish, there are equivalents of these determiners too. They are listed for you below. But when indicating possession, natives prefer using the suffixes of personal pronouns. They usually don’t use the possessive determiners. If you both use the possessive determiner and the personal pronoun suffix, it means an emphasis on the possession.
Turkish Possesive Determiners
| English | Turkish |
| My | Benim |
| Your | Senin |
| His / Her / Its | Onun |
| Their | Onların |
| Your (plural) | Sizin |
| Our | Bizim |
As you might guess, personal suffixes follow the vowel harmony rules. (Almost everything in Turkish grammar follows those rules!)
Turkish Possesive Determiners – Examples:
Benim arabam kırmızı
My car is red
Senin kaç tane çocuğun var
How many children do you have
Onların evine gittim
I went to their house
For the plurals, the same rules apply. You attach the personal suffixes after the plural suffix (-ler/lar)
Plural Possesive Determiners – Examples:
İnsanlar
Human-beings
İnsanlar+ın
Their (Human-beings’)
Onlar
They
Onların
Their
Turkish Possesive Determiners Table
| Kalem | Kitap |
| Kalemim | Kitabım |
| Kalemin | Kitabın |
| Kalemi | Kitabı |
| Kalemimiz | Kitabımız |
| Kaleminiz | Kitabınız |
| Kalemi | Kitabı |
I choose the word ‘kitap’ in the second column on purpose. ‘p’ goes to ‘b’ because of consonant mutation phenomena. Watch the Consonant Harmony video if you don’t know or don’t remember.
One thing should be emphasized here: The suffix of the plural for the third person never repeats itself.
Çocukları
His/her/its children
Çocukları
Their children
“Çocuklarları” is a significant cacophony.
1. In Turkish, some nouns and adjectives can be converted into an invocation by adding the first person singular suffix.
2. When specifying the noun, you must add the third-person suffix to the noun. Nevertheless, some time-honored food names have dropped the third-person suffix. (eg. ‘yaprak sarması‘ becomes ‘yaprak sarma‘)
Nationalities
You can form the words to indicate nationalities by adding (-li -lı). But some words of nationalities have their own words.
Azerbaycan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaycanlı
Azerbaijani
Danimarka
Denmark
Danimarkalı
Danish
Exceptions to this rule:
İtalyan
talian
İngiliz
English
Amerikan
American
Alman
German
Çek
Czech
In daily life, you may hear “Amerikalı” which has the same meaning with “Amerikan”.
