Days of the week in Turkish: pazartesi to pazar, IPA and spelling

Market day, Friday and Persian numbers: where the Turkish names come from

None of the seven names goes back to the planets of the Roman week. Turkish took its week from the Islamic and Persian world of the Ottoman Empire, and the dictionary entries trace every name through Ottoman Turkish to Arabic or Persian.

Two days anchor the system. Cuma, Friday, comes from Arabic al-jumʕa, the day of the congregational prayer, which reached Ottoman Turkish through Persian. Pazar, Sunday, is the Persian word bāzār, market; the same word still means market or bazaar in Turkish today, so a sentence like pazara gidiyorum can mean I am going to the market as easily as I am going on Sunday.

The two days that follow these anchors are named after them with ertesi, the next one. Pazartesi is pazar ertesi, the day after market day, and cumartesi is cuma ertesi, the day after Friday. Ottoman spelling wrote both as two words; modern Turkish runs them together.

The middle of the week counts in Persian. Çarşamba and perşembe are the Persian words for Wednesday and Thursday, literally four and five days after Saturday, the Persian week having started on Saturday. Salı, Tuesday, follows the same idea in Arabic: Wiktionary derives it from ṯāliṯ, third.

Lower case, capital letters and the dotless ı in salı

The spelling rules of the Türk Dil Kurumu, the Turkish Language Association, give day and month names a capital only when they state a specific date. Its example is 16 Ağustos 2005, and the same applies to a weekday written after such a date. Without a number beside it the name stays in lower case: toplantı pazartesi günü means the meeting is on Monday, and a timetable that repeats every week writes salı and cuma in small letters.

Salı is the word where the alphabet matters most. Its last letter is ı, the dotless i, a separate letter of the 29-letter Turkish alphabet and a different vowel from i. Writing sali is a spelling mistake that a Turkish reader notices at once. The capital of ı is plain I, so the word in capitals is SALI.

Plain i works the other way round: its capital keeps the dot, İ. Pazartesi in capitals is therefore PAZARTESİ and cumartesi is CUMARTESİ. Software that is not set to a Turkish locale gets this wrong and prints PAZARTESI, which a Turkish reader would read with the wrong vowel at the end.

Three letters in the names have no English equivalent. Ç in çarşamba is the ch of church, ş in çarşamba and perşembe is sh, and c in cuma and cumartesi is the j of jam.

Short forms of the days of the week in Turkish

The Unicode CLDR data that phones and computers use for Turkish has two sets. The three-letter set is Pzt, Sal, Çar, Per, Cum, Cmt, Paz; the two-letter set, used where columns are narrow, is Pt, Sa, Ça, Pe, Cu, Ct, Pa. Monday and Saturday break the obvious pattern because both would otherwise start Paz and Cum, the abbreviations of Sunday and Friday.

CLDR's full date pattern for Turkish puts the weekday at the end: d MMMM y EEEE, so a phone prints 28 Ekim 2026 Çarşamba. Day, month and year come first and the name of the day trails behind, the reverse of the English order.

How to use the days of the week in Turkish sentences

A bare day name already works as an adverb of time: pazartesi görüşürüz, see you on Monday. Speakers often add günü, the day of, as in cuma günü or salı günü, which makes the time reference explicit. Both are correct; the second is common in announcements and on official notices.

Habit is expressed with a suffix. Salıları means on Tuesdays and cumartesileri on Saturdays, every week. The same ending appears on a phrase with günü: pazar günleri, on Sundays.

Suffixes on the days follow vowel harmony, the rule that a suffix takes its vowel from the last vowel of the word. Pazartesi and perşembe end in front vowels and take -den and -e, so from Monday is pazartesiden. Salı, çarşamba, cuma and pazar end in back vowels and take -dan and -a: salıdan, cumaya, pazara. A y is slipped in between two vowels, as in salıya and perşembeye.

A range is built with the ablative on the first day and the dative on the second: pazartesiden cumaya, Monday to Friday. Next and last come before the name, gelecek cuma and geçen çarşamba. When a full date carries a suffix, the apostrophe the spelling rules prescribe goes after the date, as in the Language Association's own example, her yıl 10 Kasım’da, every year on 10 November.

The weekend in Turkey and the week of the Ottoman era

The names still reflect a week built around Friday. Under the weekly rest law of 1924 the day off in Turkey was cuma; Law 2739 of 27 May 1935 replaced Friday with Sunday, and the weekend has been cumartesi and pazar since then. The name pazartesi, the day after market day, sits comfortably in that modern week, but cumartesi, the day after Friday, recalls the older one.

The neighbouring languages show how far the Persian names spread. The Turkic word list compares Turkish with Azerbaijani, Uzbek and other relatives, and the days of the week in many languages set the Turkish row beside the Ottoman spelling in Arabic script.