The Turkish language has gone viral on social media for a particular trait: a tense that you can supposedly use specifically for gossip.
In a social media trend that will delight linguists and gossipers alike, a post is doing the rounds on X celebrating the so-called “gossip tense” in the Turkish language.
As its nickname implies, this language feature can be used in Turkish to have a good old gossip — or rather to talk about events that you haven’t witnessed yourself, emphasising that what you’re talking about is just hearsay.
You can also be judged for misleading people if you don’t use the tense, according to the post.
Whilst it’s true that such a feature does exist in the Turkish language, it may not be fully accurate to describe it as a “gossip tense.”
Instead, it’s actually a suffix rather than a tense, according to Nicholas Kontovas, Nizami Ganjavi subject librarian and manuscript curator for the Caucasus, Central Asia and Turkey at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.
“Turkish grammar is mostly composed of suffixes. And this one takes the form -mış, -miş, -muş or -müş, depending on vowel harmony,” he said. “And it’s accurate only in so much as if you were going to gossip about something that you didn’t witness firsthand, something in the past, you probably would use it.”
“But it’s actually a lot more complicated than that,” Kontovas added.
The -mış suffix could roughly be translated into English as something like “I heard that”. For example, “Ahmet yapmış” would be “(I heard that) Ahmet did it”.
These types of suffixes belong to a group known as “evidentials” — a linguistic structure that reveals how the speaker gained knowledge of the information they’re sharing.
“Generally speaking, an evidential can say, ‘I gained this knowledge firsthand, I gained this knowledge second hand, I gained this knowledge through hearsay’,” Kontovas told EuroVerify. “Evidentials can sometimes communicate in different languages your disposition towards the truthfulness of the propositions, for example ‘I heard this, but I doubt it’.”
It’s not just limited to gossip therefore: it’s used for any sort of knowledge that you’ve gained indirectly or that you doubt, among other uses. It can also double as a perfect tense, used to show a completed action (e.g. “I have seen the film” in English).
“So it’s a sort of grave oversimplification to say that -mış is for gossip because it does so much more than that,” Kontovas said. “Additionally, if you want to communicate that you absolutely don’t believe the proposition that you’re communicating, you can double them … if you use them together, it’s a sort of dubious tense.”
It’s not just a feature of Turkish either: other languages such as Mongolian and Tajik have structures like this too.
How is it used in reporting?
Languages differ however when it comes to reporting the news and disseminating information.
“There have been studies that have been done on Turkish legal cases and Turkish journalistic writing and whether or not native speakers interpret communication with -mış as a sort of ‘get out of jail free card’ or to say, ‘I didn’t actually know that, so who knows?’,” Kontovas said. “And the jury’s still out because people naturally adapt their language to the setting.”
“They generally avoid using things that could be interpreted ambiguously when they want to be absolutely sure of something, or they avoid ways of communicating, information that could get them in trouble later,” he added.
Formal news reports in Turkish will generally use phrases that say where the information has come from, according to Kontovas.
“So if you’re a good journalist, you’ll say “according to the report” and then you’ll do a direct quote or you’ll use a verb form that doesn’t communicate whether or not the information was direct or indirect,” he said.
“However, there’s a lot of bad journalism out there in Turkish, just like there is in every other language, and there you can definitely sense when somebody is saying something with surety that they definitely don’t have firsthand knowledge of when they’re using the [direct] past tense for things that they definitely didn’t witness,” Kontovas continued.
“And if we were living in a just world and fake news was held accountable, you definitely could imagine situations in which those people were taken to task for unduly communicating that information with an undue level of assuredness or authority,” he said.
While the -mış suffix could be seen as helping to lend some credibility to what is being reported, because the subject is ultimately acknowledging that what they’re saying has been reported elsewhere, it creates a “catch-22” situation, according to Kontovas.
“In proper journalism now, we tend not to use the -mış by itself because as an authoritative journalist, you don’t want to be doing that.” he said. “The best journalism in Turkish … avoids situations where you’re trying to communicate information you got from other sources with sort of unambiguously either direct or indirect verb forms whatsoever.”
Sometimes, using -mış in journalism can come across as sarcastic because people don’t expect to see it used in that way.
“If you’re using -mış and you’re intentionally casting doubt on the potential veracity of your statement, then people will infer that doubt just as a matter of pragmatics, because they think ‘this is a journalist, they’re being careful to use all these verb forms that don’t commit them to the truth of a statement’,” Kontovas said. “Now, that’s maybe not bad journalism, but it’s definitely a certain type of journalism where the author is trying to sort of intentionally cast doubt on a proposition.”
