What IS That? A Really Long Turkish Word

According to a 2017 article from Euronews, Turkish has the longest word of any of the world’s known languages. The article claims 75-lettered word “Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinesiniz,” is the winner of the world’s longest word prize. It means “You would be from those we can not easily/quickly make a maker of unsuccessful ones.” Whatever that means…

Whether that is the longest word in the world or not I can’t say for sure. But I can say that for a native English speaker Turkish can be a rather bewildering language. It is an agglutinative language, meaning that the language is composed of word pieces that each indicate a grammar structure. So if you were going to say “to the mountains” as in “I’m going to the mountains” it would be “dağlara.” “Dağ” means mountain, “lar” makes it plural (mountains), and “a” means “to.”

Let's go to these mountains. They are the Taurus Mountains spilling into the Mediterranean Sea in Antalya, Turkey.

As you can see from above, these word pieces come as suffixes. This is further bewildering for the native English speaker. The root word of the giant word above is “muvaffak” which means “successful.” The 67 letters that follow are all suffixes. Yikes!

If you are interested in dabbling in the Turkish language, I would recommend you give Duolingo or Turkish Tea Time a try.