Are You...? Turning the Turkish Present Continuous into a Question (-iyor mu)

To ask “are you reading?” or “is she coming?” in Turkish, you don’t reach for a helper word the way English reaches for “do” or “are.” You add one small, separate word — mu — right after the verb you already know how to build.

What this particle does

Any present-continuous statement can become a yes/no question by adding mu after the -iyor verb, with the personal ending riding on mu rather than on the verb itself:

• Okuyormusun? — Are you reading?
• Geliyor mu? — Is he/she coming?
• Bekliyor muyuz? — Are we waiting?

Nothing about the verb itself changes. The particle simply slots in after it, and the sentence’s question mark is carried by that particle alone — Turkish has no separate rising-intonation-only question form the way casual English sometimes uses (“You’re coming?”).

Forming it

The full set of question forms for the present continuous, by person, using geliyor (“is coming”) as the model:

So: geliyor muyum? (am I coming?), geliyor musun? (are you coming?), geliyor mu? (is he/she coming?), geliyor muyuz? (are we coming?), geliyor musunuz? (are you, pl./formal, coming?), geliyorlar mı? (are they coming?).

Here’s the detail that trips learners up: the particle after -iyor is always mu, never mı, mi, or mü. The question particle normally harmonizes 4-way with whatever vowel comes right before it — but every present-continuous verb ends in the fixed syllable -yor, and the vowel in -yor is always o, regardless of whether the verb’s own stem was front or back, rounded or unrounded (okuyor, bekliyor, anlıyor, and gülüyor all end the same way). Since o falls in the “o, u → mu” harmony class, the particle locks onto mu every single time — it never varies by verb.

Just as with the affirmative and negative forms, a buffer -y- appears before the vowel-initial 1st-person endings so mu and the ending don’t collide: mu + um becomes muyum, and mu + uz becomes muyuz. The 2nd-person endings (-sun, -sunuz) already start with a consonant, so they attach to mu directly with no buffer needed.

Exceptions worth knowing

Onlar (they) breaks the pattern in two ways at once. Instead of mu attaching to the bare verb and carrying a plural personal ending, the plural suffix -lar attaches directly onto -iyor first, and only then does the question particle follow — as its own bare word, with no personal ending attached, since -lar has already shown both the person and the number:

• Geliyorlar mı? — Are they coming? (not geliyor mular? or geliyorlar mu?)
• Çalışıyorlar mı? — Are they working?

Notice the particle itself also changes here: it’s mı, not mu. That’s because the harmony now looks at the last vowel of -lar (a, a back unrounded vowel), which falls in the “a, ı → mı” class — not at the -yor that precedes it. The -lar suffix effectively resets which vowel the particle harmonizes with.

Whatever irregularity the verb already has in its plain -iyor form carries straight through. A verb like gitmek (“to go”), whose stem-final t softens to d before the vowel-initial -iyor (giving gidiyor, not gitiyor), keeps that same softened form when you ask a question — the question particle attaches after the verb is already fully formed, so it never undoes anything that happened earlier in the word:

• Ali okula gidiyor mu? — Is Ali going to school? (from the already-softened gidiyor, not gitiyor mu?)

Examples

• Sen şimdi ders çalışıyor musun? — Are you studying right now?
• Anneniz yemek pişiriyor mu? — Is your mother cooking?
• Ben yeterince hızlı koşuyor muyum? — Am I running fast enough?
• Biz doğru yolda gidiyor muyuz? — Are we going the right way?
• Siz hâlâ bizi bekliyor musunuz? — Are you (pl./formal) still waiting for us?
• Çocuklar hâlâ bahçede oynuyorlar mı? — Are the children still playing in the garden?

The last example shows the onlar pattern in a full sentence: -lar attaches to oynuyor first (oynuyorlar), and the bare particle mı — not mu — follows as its own word.

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will have you flip the same verb between statement and question across all six persons, so the mu-stays-mu pattern for five of them and the -lar…mı switch for onlar both become automatic — well before Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards would otherwise need to remind you which one applies. For how this same particle behaves outside the present continuous — with nouns, adjectives, and other tenses — see the dedicated lesson on the yes/no question particle itself.