Say salam in Turkmen the way you would in Arabic or Turkish and you already have an accent. In standard Turkmen the letter s is pronounced close to the th in think, and z close to the th in this, so the greeting comes out nearer to thalam. It's one of several small surprises for anyone who decides to learn Turkmen, a Turkic language with its own Latin alphabet and somewhere between six and eight million speakers.
The short answer to how: spend the first few days on the alphabet, which goes quickly because the spelling is regular. Then build the core of the grammar, which means suffixes stacked in a fixed order, vowel harmony and the verb at the end of the sentence. Take A1 and A2 with a structured course, review vocabulary every day, and find at least one speaker to write to, because a stay in Turkmenistan is hard to arrange. The questions below cover the rest.
Where is Turkmen spoken?
Mostly in Turkmenistan, where it is the state language. There are also long-established Turkmen communities in northeastern Iran, especially in Golestan province, and in northern Afghanistan, with smaller groups in Turkey, Uzbekistan and Russia. Numbers outside Turkmenistan are uncertain, so be suspicious of anyone who gives you a precise total.
In Iran and Afghanistan Turkmen is written in the Perso-Arabic script, and the spoken varieties there differ from the standard taught in Ashgabat. Everything in this guide refers to the standard language of Turkmenistan.
Which alphabet does Turkmen use?
The Latin alphabet, officially since 1993. Before that Turkmen was written in Cyrillic, from 1940; before that, briefly, in an earlier Latin alphabet; and before that in Arabic script. Today's alphabet has 30 letters, and a few of them don't do what an English speaker expects:
| Letter | Sound | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ä | the a in cat | bäş (five) |
| ç | ch as in church | çörek (bread) |
| ň | ng as in sing | adyň (your name) |
| ş | sh | Aşgabat (Ashgabat) |
| w | somewhere between English v and w | suw (water) |
| y | a vowel like Turkish ı, an i made further back | gyz (girl) |
| ý | y as in yes | ýok (no) |
| ö, ü | as in German | dört (four), üç (three) |
The trap is y. In Turkmen it's a vowel, and the consonant is written ý. Read ýok and gyz aloud a few times and the difference sticks.
Is Turkmen hard for English speakers?
Easier than it looks in some ways, harder in others.
The easy part is the structure. There's no grammatical gender, no articles, and spelling matches pronunciation. A Turkmen word is a root with suffixes added in a fixed order, so kitap (book) becomes kitaplar (books), kitaplarym (my books) and kitaplarymda (in my books). Learn the suffixes and you can build words you've never seen, something English, with its went and bought, rarely lets you do.
The harder part comes from four places. Vowel harmony changes each suffix to match the vowels of the root, so the plural of kitap is kitaplar but the plural of öý, house, is öýler. There are six cases. The verb comes at the end, so in a long sentence you hold everything in your head until the last word. And Turkmen keeps long vowels that most Turkic languages lost, without marking them in spelling: the textbook pair is at, horse, with a short vowel, and at, name, with a long one. Learn words by ear as well as by eye, and don't worry if this takes months to settle.
Then there's vocabulary. Apart from loans from Arabic, Persian and Russian, almost nothing looks like English, so new words need steady review rather than one heroic evening. Our guide to learning a language on your own has practical ways to keep that going when there's no class to show up to.
