Çekimi

Çekimi is the Turkish term for inflection or conjugation, referring to how word forms change to express grammatical relationships. In Turkish, çekimi covers both noun/adjective inflection (including number and case) and verb conjugation (tense, aspect, mood, voice, and person). The language is agglutinative, adding suffixes in a chain to a word stem, and vowel harmony shapes many of these suffixes.

Noun and adjective çekimi marks number and case through suffixes. Turkish nouns can take a plural suffix such as -ler/-lar and various case endings: genitive (-in/-ın/-un/-ün), dative (-e/-a), accusative (-i), locative (-de/-da), and ablative (-den/-dan). Possessive suffixes attach as well, so forms like evlerimizde (in our houses) illustrate how number, possession, and case stack together. Turkish has no gender, so the same inflectional system applies across all nouns and adjectives.

Verb çekimi handles tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Verbs are conjugated by attaching suffixes to a stem. Examples: gelmek gives geliyorum (I am coming), geldim (I came), geleceğim (I will come). Negation uses -me/-ma as in gelmiyorum (I am not coming). The imperative is formed with a short stem or a dedicated ending, as in gel! (come). Turkish also employs various mood forms and passive constructions through additional suffixes.

Key characteristics of çekimi include its suffix-based, fully productive system, consistent with vowel harmony, and its role in determining word order and meaning through morphological changes rather than internal stem modification.