Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

(4) Efendim, biz sizin kadar bilemeyiz bu konuları tabii ki.
‘Naturally, I cannot know these subjects as well as you [do].’
siz and sen:
The 2nd person form siz is used in the following circumstances:
(i) To indicate the plurality of the 2nd person (i.e. ‘you both/all’)
(ii) When addressing a person with whom one is on formal terms (in which case
both parties normally address each other as siz).
(iii) When one is addressing a person who is taken to be of higher rank or status.
(5) Siz şu sıralarda sinemaya gittiniz mi?
(a) ‘Have you (both/all) been to the cinema lately?’
(b) ‘Have you (=formal, singular) been to the cinema lately?’
Children are almost always addressed as sen; older people are generally addressed as siz,
and new acquaintances most commonly address each other as siz. Speakers who normally
address each other as sen may, in a formal situation (such as a committee meeting), adopt
the conventional formality of siz. However, the choice between siz and sen varies among
speakers, since the notion of formality depends largely on the social background of the
persons involved and, to some degree, on the speakers’ attitude towards the norms of
social hierarchy.
bizler and sizler:
biz ‘we’ and siz ‘you’ can combine with the plural suffix. Using bizler and sizler
instead of biz and siz has only a marginally different effect, and is confined to the
following circumstances:
(i) Where the speaker wishes to individuate the members of a group, especially in
cases where the speaker wants to indicate that the action was carried out, or the event
experienced, individually, not as a group:
(6) Bizler kırık not alınca çok üzülürdük.
‘We (each of us) would be sad when we (each of us) got a bad mark.’
(ii) For referring to multiple groups of persons:
(7) Sizler, Ankara’lı ve İstanbul’lular, Türkiye’nin geri kalanını
tanımıyorsunuz.
‘You, people from Ankara and Istanbul, don’t know the rest of Turkey.’
(iii) When talking to a person with whom one uses the formal siz, to indicate that one is
referring to a group that that person belongs to (e.g. his/her family or friends, etc.), and
not to that person alone:
(8) Sizler nasılsınız?
‘How are you (both/all)?’
Pronouns 231
o and onlar:
For the use of these forms as resumptive pronouns in relative clauses intro-
duced by ki, see 25.6.