Turkish Postpositions: ile, için, gibi, kadar, göre & More

English puts relational words like “with,” “for,” and “after” in front of the noun they govern - that’s what makes them prepositions. Turkish does the mirror image: the same jobs are handled by words that come after the noun, called postpositions. There’s no Turkish equivalent of “with the book” word-for-word - instead you get the equivalent of “the book with.”

What postpositions do

A Turkish postposition sits right after a noun phrase and expresses its relationship to the rest of the sentence - accompaniment, purpose, comparison, extent, time, or opposition, among others. Some of the most frequent:

• ile (“with,” “by,” “and”) - Arkadaşımla sinemaya gittim. - I went to the movies with my friend.
• için (“for”) - Bu hediye senin için. - This gift is for you.
• gibi (“like,” “as”) - O, bir aslan gibi cesur. - He/she is brave like a lion.
• kadar (“as much as,” “until”) - Sen kadar hızlı koşamıyorum. - I can’t run as fast as you.
• göre (“according to”) - Bana göre bu film çok uzun. - According to me, this film is too long.
• sonra (“after”) - Yemekten sonra kahve içelim. - Let’s have coffee after the meal.
• önce (“before”) - Dersten önce ödevimi bitirdim. - I finished my homework before class.
• karşı (“against,” “toward”) - Bana karşı çok naziksin. - You’re very kind toward me.
• rağmen (“despite”) - Yağmura rağmen dışarı çıktık. - Despite the rain, we went outside.
• doğru (“toward”) - Eve doğru yürüdük. - We walked toward home.

Forming it: which case goes before each postposition

The one rule to really internalize is that each postposition has its own fixed case requirement for the noun before it - it isn’t a free choice, and it doesn’t change with meaning (except for kadar, noted below). Postpositions fall into three groups:

With an ordinary noun, için, gibi, kadar, and ile attach with no suffix at all - iş için (for work), kuş gibi (like a bird). But swap the noun for a personal pronoun and those same four postpositions suddenly require the genitive case instead:

So it’s iş için (for work) but benim için (for me) - the bare/genitive split depends on whether the complement is a full noun or a pronoun, not on anything about the postposition’s meaning.

Exceptions worth knowing

ile usually isn’t a separate word at all. In everyday speech and writing it collapses onto the preceding noun as the suffix -(y)le/-(y)la: otobüsle (“by bus”), Ali’yle (“with Ali”), benimle (“with me”). The full word ile and the suffix are interchangeable in meaning - the suffix is simply far more common.

kadar changes which case it governs depending on its meaning. For comparison (“as much as”), it keeps the bare/genitive pattern shared with için, gibi, and ile: Senin kadar koşamıyorum. - I can’t run as much as you. For a temporal “until,” it switches to the dative instead: Akşama kadar seni bekledim. - I waited for you until the evening.

Postposition-pronoun combinations have irregular third-person forms worth memorizing separately, the same way the dative/ablative/genitive cases themselves have an irregular o → on- stem. Onun için (for him/her/it/them-singular) and onlar için (for them) both occur, but onun is far more frequent in natural speech for a singular referent.

Examples

• Bu kitabı senin için aldım. - I bought this book for you.
• O, babası gibi çalışkan. - He is hardworking like his father.
• Toplantıdan sonra eve gittik. - We went home after the meeting.
• Okuldan önce kahvaltı ettim. - I had breakfast before school.
• Bütün gün yağmura rağmen bahçede çalıştı. - He worked in the garden all day despite the rain.
• Bu konuda bana göre haklısın. - On this topic, according to me, you’re right.

Each sentence pairs a postposition with exactly the case its own group requires - no case at all for için and gibi, ablative for sonra and önce, dative for göre and rağmen - regardless of what the sentence as a whole is about.

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will drill you on matching each postposition to its required case until reaching for göre automatically pulls the dative along with it, and Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards keep the trickier pairs - like kadar’s two different cases, or ile’s suffixed form - reviewed often enough that they stop feeling like exceptions.