Possessive Suffixes

Kazakh grammar for beginners · The ending goes on the thing owned

Kazakh marks the owner on the noun that is owned: "my father" is a single word, äkem (әкем). There is one ending per person, with a separate polite form for "you", and they all occupy a fixed slot — straight after the plural, before any case ending.

A Kazakh noun can carry several endings at once, and their order is fixed: the plural goes on first, the possessive second, the case ending last. You have just done the first slot, so the possessive is the next one along.

The possessive ending says who something belongs to, and it attaches to the thing owned rather than to the owner. So äke (әке) "father" becomes äkem (әкем) "my father" and äkemız (әкеміз) "our father", each of them one word. The owner does not have to be named separately.

The endings

Two written shapes per ending, never four: the choice is frontness alone, exactly as in the plural. The right-hand column is the left-hand one with a linking vowel in front — the same y (ы) / ı (і) pair every time — which appears whenever the stem ends in a consonant. The third person is one row rather than two because a single ending covers one owner and several owners alike. There is no separate ending for a plural "you" either: the second-person endings do that job as well, and the plural is shown on the noun instead.

A stem ending in a vowel: äke (әке) "father"

A stem ending in a consonant: qalam (қалам) "pen"

The pronoun in front is optional

Kazakh also has a set of possessive pronouns: menıñ (менің) "my", senıñ (сенің) "your", sızdıñ (сіздің) "your" (polite), onyñ (оның) "his, her, its", bızdıñ (біздің) "our", senderdıñ (сендердің) and sızderdıñ (сіздердің) "your" addressed to more than one person, and olardyñ (олардың) "their".

One of these can be placed in front of the noun, and the noun keeps its ending either way — äkem (әкем) and menıñ äkem (менің әкем) both mean "my father".

Any of the eight can stand there. Three are shown here, and two more appear just below, where the point being made is the number of owners rather than the optional pronoun.

One ending, however many owners

The third-person ending does not change when there is more than one owner. "His father" and "their father" are the same word, and only the pronoun in front separates them.

The second person behaves the same way: the plain and the polite ending each serve one addressee or several, and what marks the difference is the plural on the noun.

A final k (к) or p (п) softens before the ending

A stem-final k (к) becomes g (г) and a stem-final p (п) becomes b (б) when a possessive ending follows, and the spelling shows it.

The other stem change is one you have already met: in a two-syllable word the short vowel of the second syllable can drop out, so mūryn (мұрын) "nose" gives mūrny (мұрны) "his nose".

Plural, then possessive, then case

One word can fill all three slots at once, and they always come in that order. Cases are a later lesson; what matters here is that the possessive sits between the plural and the case ending, never anywhere else.

Two shapes where Turkish writes four

Turkish spells rounding harmony, so its possessive has four written forms: -ım, -im, -um, -üm. Kazakh does not spell rounding, so there are two, -ym (-ым) and -ım (-ім). Kazakhs still round the vowel after a rounded stem; you simply never have to write it.

The polite second person lines up as well — Kazakh -yñyz (-ыңыз) / -ıñız (-іңіз) against Turkish -ınız / -iniz — and it is used for people older than the speaker, people in a position of authority, and anyone the speaker does not know well. The plain -yñ (-ың) / -ıñ (-ің) goes to people you would call by their first name.

The thing to un-learn is the third person. Turkish separates babası from babaları; Kazakh does not, and olardyñ äkesı (олардың әкесі) is "their father" with the ordinary ending.

When the thing owned is left out

To say "mine" or "yours" with no noun after it, Kazakh adds -nıkı (-нікі) to the possessor. It also appears as -dıkı (-дікі) and -tıkı (-тікі), and it is the one suffix in the language that ignores vowel harmony — the vowels stay ı (і) whatever the root.

There are eight of these too, one per pronoun, and Turkish answers all eight with -ki on the possessive pronoun.