A list of English–Turkish cognates and false-cognates

Abstract

This article presents a list of English–Turkish cognates and false cognates which was compiled from a corpus of over 80,000 words in dictionary entries. The list contains 2411 English words that are either cognates or false cognates in Turkish. It was revealed that there are at least 1287 cognates, excluding all proper nouns of people, places, and things; and 1124 false cognates, 96 of which share at least one sense of meaning in each language, and thus are partial false cognates. The total number of English–Turkish cognates and false cognates suggests that cognate status between the two languages is around 3%. For cognates, the rate is 1.6%, and for false cognates the rate is 1.2%. The current database of English–Turkish cognates and false cognates can be used to prepare reading texts that contain words from the list presented here, and to investigate how they affect reading comprehension, guessing from context, and language learning or processing of a language issues. It can be also used as a resource for researchers investigating the bilinguals of English and Turkish, and learners who study Turkish and/or English as a second or foreign language. The list provides a useful basis for further research into the lexical, linguistic, and psychological issues.