The Kazakh Copula

Kazakh grammar for beginners · Saying "I am a teacher" with no verb at all

The last three lessons have all been about shaping a single noun. This one uses that noun to make a statement: "I am a teacher", "my father is a doctor", "you are alone".

Kazakh does that without a verb. There is no present-tense "to be" to reach for, so instead an ending goes on the last word of the sentence, and that ending says which person the sentence is about.

That linking job — joining the subject to whatever is said about it — is what a copula is, and it is what this lesson is named after. English uses a verb for it, the "am" in "I am a teacher"; Turkish uses an ending, öğretmenim; Kazakh works the same way.

These endings are called the predicate personal endings — the predicate being the part of a sentence that says something about the subject. There is one for each of the eight pronouns, and they are the whole of this lesson.

The pronoun becomes an ending

The ending is the pronoun in miniature: mūğalımmın (мұғаліммін) "I am a teacher" is mūğalım (мұғалім) "teacher" with the m (м) of men (мен) "I" on the end.

The third person is the exception — it adds nothing at all. Ol mūğalım (Ол мұғалім) is a complete sentence with nothing joining its two words, and the plural behaves the same way.

The eight endings

The sentence is about	The ending
me	-myn (-мын) / -mın (-мін), -byn (-бын) / -bın (-бін), -pyn (-пын) / -pın (-пін)
you — one person, plain	-syñ (-сың) / -sıñ (-сің)
you — one person, polite	-syz (-сыз) / -sız (-сіз)
him, her, it	nothing
us	-myz (-мыз) / -mız (-міз), -byz (-быз) / -bız (-біз), -pyz (-пыз) / -pız (-піз)
you — several people, plain	-syñdar (-сыңдар) / -sıñder (-сіңдер)
you — several people, polite	-syzdar (-сыздар) / -sızder (-сіздер)
them	nothing

The three shapes of the first person

The word ends in	"I am"	"we are"
a vowel — or r (р), l (л), i (й), u (у), m (м), n (н), ñ (ң)	-myn (-мын) / -mın (-мін)	-myz (-мыз) / -mız (-міз)
z (з) or j (ж)	-byn (-бын) / -bın (-бін)	-byz (-быз) / -bız (-біз)
a voiceless consonant: k, q, p, s, t, f, h, ş (к, қ, п, с, т, ф, х, ш) — and also b, v, g, d (б, в, г, д)	-pyn (-пын) / -pın (-пін)	-pyz (-пыз) / -pız (-піз)

The bottom row carries the same wrinkle as the plural table — b (б), v (в), g (г) and d (д) are voiced letters, but Kazakh devoices them at the end of a word, so they select the voiceless shape.

Two choices: the vowel by harmony, the consonant by the last sound

Two separate things decide how an ending is written. The vowel follows harmony: a front-vowel word takes -mın (-мін), a back-vowel word -myn (-мын). The first consonant follows the last sound of the word, on the principle you already used for the plural — voiceless after a voiceless consonant, voiced everywhere else.

m (м) is the ordinary form, p (п) is the voiceless one, and there is one extra split — after z (з) or j (ж) the m (м) stiffens into b (б). That gives three shapes for "I am" and three for "we are", each of them in a front and a back version.

Only the first person does this. The second-person endings begin with s (с) after every sound, and the third person has nothing to alternate.

The four ways to say "you", on the front-vowel word änşı (әнші) "singer"

The third person really does add nothing

A sentence about someone else is a subject and a noun with no ending anywhere and no verb: "my father — a doctor" is how it looks, and it is a complete, ordinary sentence.

This is the shape you are most likely to distrust, because nothing marks it as a sentence. Nothing needs to.

Two details to check against your Turkish

A Turkish personal ending never changes its consonant. -im is -im after every word, picking up a buffer y after a vowel in the first person, singular and plural alike (öğrenciyim, öğrenciyiz), and doing nothing else. The Kazakh first-person ending swaps its m (м) for b (б) or p (п) according to the sound before it, and there is no Turkish habit to fall back on for it.

Both languages leave the noun singular, Biz öğretmeniz and Bız mūğalımmız (Біз мұғалімміз), where English insists on "teachers". Turkish can pluralise it — Biz öğretmenleriz, Siz öğretmenlersiniz — but only for emphasis, setting the group against everyone outside it: "we are the teachers, they are not". Kazakh can put the noun in the plural too.

Keep going

← Family and Kinship · Saying What Something Is Not →

All Kazakh lessons

• The Alphabet — Read Kazakh without learning Cyrillic
• How the Letters Behave — The things spelling does not tell you
• Turkish ↔ Kazakh Sound Laws — Six rules that unlock hundreds of words for free
• Vowel Harmony — The same system as Turkish — with one simplification
• Numbers — One to a thousand, and what a number does to the word after it
• Days of the Week — Saturday, and the days counted off it
• Months — Twelve names to learn outright
• Seasons — The four, and the weather that comes with them
• The Plural — One suffix, six written shapes
• Body Parts — From the top of the head to the sole of the foot, and the organs in between
• Personal Pronouns — Four ways to say "you", one word for "he" and "she"
• Possessive — The ending goes on the thing owned
• Family and Kinship — Lineages, generational ties, and reciprocal kinship
• Saying What Something Is Not — One extra word, and the personal ending moves onto it
• Asking a Question — One small word at the end, and nothing else moves
• Having and Not Having — No verb "to have" — only "there is" and "there is not"
• Where: the Locative — Location and time: one ending
• Where to: the Dative — Direction, destination, recipient, and purpose
• Where from: the Ablative — Starting points, origins, and standards of comparison
• Whose: the Genitive — Possession, definite noun phrases, and relationships
• What: the Accusative — The thing an action is done to — marked only when it is a particular one
• With: the Instrumental — Who you did it with, and what you did it with
• All Seven Together — What each ending marks, and every shape it takes
• Spatial Postpositions and Relational Nouns — Expressing position, direction and time with postpositions and relational nouns
• Verbs, Infinitives and Commands — From dictionary forms in {{-у}} to bare stems, commands and polite requests
• Simple Present Tense — Habitual actions, general facts and future intentions in {{-а / -е / -й}}
• Simple Past Tense — Witnessed and completed past actions in {{-ды / -ді / -ты / -ті}}
• Distant Past and Past Participle — Experienced past actions in {{-ған / -ген}} and conversational negation with {{жоқ}}
• Habitual Past and the "Used-To" Aspect — Expressing past routines in {{-атын / -етін / -йтын / -йтін}} and habitual participles
• Reported and Narrative Past — Hearsay, indirect evidence and surprise discoveries in {{-ыпты / -іпті / -пты / -пті}}
• The Present Continuous Tense — Ongoing actions and the four auxiliary verbs of physical stance
• Future Tenses — Definite intentions in {{-мақ / -мек}} and probable futures in {{-ар / -ер / -р}}
• Desires, Intentions and Optatives — Expressing wishes in {{-ғым келеді}} and making proposals in {{-айын / -айық}}
• Ability and Inability — Expressing "can" and "cannot" using converbs in {{-а / -е / -й}} and {{алу}}
• Conditionals and "If" Clauses — Real and hypothetical conditions in {{-са / -се}} and counterfactuals with {{еді}}
• Sequential Converbs and Action Chains — Linking consecutive actions in {{-ып / -іп / -п}} without repeating conjunctions
• Causative, Passive and Reflexive Verb Voices — Grammatical voice derivations in {{-дыр / -қыз / -т}}, {{-ыл / -іл}} and {{-ыс / -іс}}
• Necessity, Obligation and Possibility — Expressing "must", "need to" and "might" with {{керек}}, {{қажет}} and {{мүмкін}}
• Verb Differences & False Friends — How common Kazakh and Turkish verbs parted ways over time

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