Months in Turkish: ocak to aralık, their origins and date writing

Arabic, Aramaic and Latin: eight month names from the Ottoman calendar

Turkish month names are a record of the calendars the Ottoman state used. Eight of them, February to September, come from the Rumi calendar of the late Ottoman period, and they came from two directions.

Five are the Syrian month names that Arabic used: şubat, nisan, haziran, temmuz and eylül. Wiktionary traces nisan through Arabic naysān and Classical Syriac back to Akkadian nisannum, and temmuz through Arabic tammūz to Aramaic and Akkadian, the same root as the Hebrew month Tammuz. Haziran comes from Classical Syriac.

The other three are Roman. Mart, mayıs and ağustos reached Ottoman Turkish through Greek from Latin martius, Maius and Augustus. A Turkish speaker who also knows Arabic hears the first group as familiar; an English speaker recognises the second at once.

Turkey has counted years in the Gregorian way since 1926, and Gregorian dates had been in use since March 1917. The months kept their old names through that change, so the calendar on a Turkish wall still mixes Semitic and Latin words.

Ocak, ekim, kasım and aralık: the four names of 1945

Until 1945 the Ottoman calendar had two pairs of months that shared one name: teşrinievvel and teşrinisani, the first and second Teşrin, for October and November, and kânunuevvel and kânunusani for December and January. A law dated 10 January 1945, number 4696, replaced all four. The bill text recorded by the Grand National Assembly reads: Teşrinievvel ayı Ekim, Teşrinisani ayı Kasım, Kânunuevvel ayı Aralık, ve Kânunusani ayı da Ocak olarak değiştirilmiştir.

The new names were not invented from nothing. Ocak means hearth or stove and is a literal translation of Arabic kānūn, the hearth that the old name already contained. Ekim means sowing, from the verb ek-, to plant; Wiktionary records it as coined by the Turkish Language Association in 1945. Aralık means a gap or interval, the space between one year and the next. Kasım is Arabic qāsim, divider, the name of the day that opens winter in the folk calendar; a weather proverb puts the start of winter on 8 November.

The reasoning given with the bill was practical: the old pairs were hard to pronounce and to write, and ocak and ekim were already heard in country speech. Wiktionary still lists kânunusani and kânunuevvel, marked archaic, as synonyms of ocak and aralık.

Capital letters, dotless ı and the silent ğ

The spelling rules of the Turkish Language Association capitalise a month only when it is part of a specific date. Its examples are 16 Ağustos 2005 and her yıl 10 Kasım’da, every year on 10 November. A month without a day number beside it stays in lower case: bütünleme sınavları geçen yıl eylül ayında yapılmıştı, the resit exams were held in September last year.

Three months contain the dotless ı: mayıs, kasım and aralık. In capitals they become MAYIS, KASIM and ARALIK, because the capital of ı is plain I. The dotted i of eylül and nisan keeps its dot in capitals, EYLÜL and NİSAN. A program that capitalises Turkish text without the Turkish locale writes NISAN, which reads with the wrong vowel.

Ağustos contains ğ, the soft g. It has no sound of its own here: between two back vowels it falls silent, and Wiktionary transcribes the word /a.usˈtos/. The same silent ğ appears in Ağu, the abbreviation, which keeps the letter even though nobody pronounces it.

How to write a date with the months in Turkish

Turkish puts the day first, then the month, then the year. The spelling rules list six accepted forms for one date: 20 Ocak 1983, 20.01.1983, 20.1.1983, 20.I.1983, 20/1/1983 and 20/01/1983. The fourth form writes the month as a Roman numeral, a habit shared with several European languages.

Unicode CLDR, the locale data behind phones and computers, uses d MMMM y for the long date, d MMM y for the medium and d.MM.y for the short one, and adds the weekday at the end of the full form: 28 Ekim 2026 Çarşamba. Its abbreviations of the months in Turkish are the first three letters, Oca, Şub, Mar, Nis, May, Haz, Tem, Ağu, Eyl, Eki, Kas, Ara; May and Mar need no shortening.

Suffixes for in follow vowel harmony. A month whose last vowel is a, ı, o or u takes -da or -ta: ocakta, şubatta, martta, mayısta, temmuzda, aralıkta. One whose last vowel is e, i, ö or ü takes -de or -te: eylülde, ekimde. In everyday speech the word ayı, the month of, is often added: nisan ayında, in the month of April. Hours use a full stop, not a colon: 15.30.

Turkish month names beside Arabic and Greek

Several Turkish names have close relatives in the region. The Arabic of the Levant and Iraq uses the Syrian set, and its row in the months in many languages reads šubāṭ, nīsān, ḥazīrān, tammūz and aylūl, the sources of şubat, nisan, haziran, temmuz and eylül. The same row still has the paired names Turkish gave up in 1945: tišrīn al-awwal and tišrīn aṯ-ṯānī for October and November, kānūn al-awwal and kānūn aṯ-ṯānī for December and January. Mart, mayıs and ağustos show the Greek route they took: Greek has Μάρτιος, Μάϊος and Αὔγουστος, as the months in Greek explain.

In the Ottoman Turkish row of that table, written in Arabic script, ocak appears as اوجاق and kasım as قاسم, the Arabic word it was taken from.