Kelimeler

Kelimeler (the Turkish plural form of kelime) are the basic units of language that carry meaning and participate in syntax. In Turkish, kelime is the singular form and kelimeler the plural. In linguistic terms, a word is the smallest unit that can function as a discrete item in speech or writing, though the exact definition varies across languages and theories. Kelimeler serve as the building blocks of sentences and vocabulary in Turkish.

Turkish is an agglutinative language. Most kelimeler are formed by attaching suffixes to a root or stem, creating complex forms that mark person, number, tense, mood, case, and other grammatical relations. As a result, a single Turkish word can express what would require several words in many other languages. For example, a base like ev- (home) can yield forms that convey plural, possession, and case all in one word, such as evlerimizden meaning “from our houses.”

Kelimeler are typologically categorized as content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and function words (pronouns, conjunctions, particles). Turkish relies heavily on suffixation rather than fixed word order to indicate grammatical relations, so the morphological structure of kelimeler often encodes syntax.

In lexicography and natural language processing, kelimeler are analyzed in terms of lemmas and inflected forms. Dictionaries present lemmas with multiple senses, etymologies, and usage notes, while computational tools perform tokenization and stemming to reduce inflected kelimeler to lemmas for processing.