Marking Plurality in Turkish and Persian: A Contrastive Morphological Analysis

The aim of the study is to compare and contrast the pluralisation suffixes in Turkish and Persian, two geographically and culturally neighbouring languages, in order to analyse both the main morphological differences and parallels between the two languages. To this end, the inventory of plural suffixes in Turkish and Persian are methodically identified and analysed with a special focus on their phonological forms, distributional patterns, and syntactic implications. The study shows that, both languages employ several inflectional suffixes to pluralise nouns but, the type and application of these suffixes are quite different. The analysis is conducted in three stages, namely description, juxtaposition and comparison, which is in accordance with the contrastive grammar methodology. The results of this contrastive study show that, the variety of plural forms in Persian is more than those of in Turkish as Persian has irregular or broken plural forms, and this increases the morphological complexity of the language. In contrast, Turkish pluralisation is highly regular and predictable, sticking closely to morphophonemic standards based on consonantal assimilation and vowel harmony. Another distinguishing trait is that Persian establishes a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in pluralisation, whereas Turkish does not. It is evident that the pluralisation techniques used in these two languages, which share a large word inventory, are constantly different. Persian-speaking Turkish learners may struggle with these variations, particularly when studying rule-based affixation or dealing with irregularity. Based on these findings, the study makes practical recommendations for instructors, second language learners, curriculum planners, translators, and textbook authors working in bilingual or comparative environments