Why ö ğ ş ç of all letters

ö, ğ, ş, ç — all four exist in the Turkish alphabet, and three of them in Azerbaijani as well. No new characters were invented; existing ones were adopted.

Why that matters

The question people should be asking is this one: "Will we have to buy fonts and replace software?" The answer is no.

These letters belong to the part of Unicode called latin-ext. Thanks to Turkish and Azerbaijani they have been in the core fonts of every operating system for thirty years. Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone, Linux — all of them. Word, your browser and your phone will render them with no extra work at all.

Had a newly invented character been introduced, the picture would have been very different: waiting for font updates, empty boxes on older devices, trouble at the printers.

The keyboard is another matter

Fonts are fine; keyboards are not. The standard Latin layout has no keys for these letters. That is exactly why we build layouts and write instructions — see the Keyboard page.

Where they sit in the alphabet

The collation order is Turkish and Azerbaijani too: ç after b, ğ after g, ö after o, ş after s.

This matters to developers: with default sorting ö and ğ end up after z, because their code points are higher. Getting the order right takes a locale-aware comparison — we have a separate page for developers about that.

The new edition of the orthography rules has not been published yet, so we will update our table as soon as the official order is announced.