Predicting Difficulties for Urdu-Speaking Learners of Turkish: An Inflectional Comparison

Abstract

The number of Urdu-speaking learners of Turkish appears to be growing, yet little contrastive work exists to guide teaching for this group. This study compares the inflectional morphology of standard Turkish and standard Urdu and uses the comparison to predict where Urdu-speaking learners are likely to face difficulty. The study is document-based and applies contrastive analysis, taking grammatical function as the basis of comparison across nominal inflection (number, possession, case, gender agreement) and verbal inflection (person, tense and aspect, alignment). The analysis shows that the two languages share word order and several categories but differ in their means: Turkish marks relations inside the word with regular suffixes, has no gender, and is consistently accusative; Urdu uses postpositions and auxiliaries, shows pervasive gender agreement, and is split-ergative. Specific predicted difficulties and teaching suggestions are derived and, because they come from a comparison of grammatical descriptions rather than learner data, are offered as hypotheses for empirical testing.