What is Turkish's 'gossip tense' and what does it mean for disinformation?

In a social media trend that will delight linguists and gossipers alike, a post is doing the rounds on X celebrating the so-called "gossip tense" in the Turkish language.

As its nickname implies, this language feature can be used in Turkish to have a good old gossip — or rather to talk about events that you haven't witnessed yourself, emphasising that what you're talking about is just hearsay.

You can also be judged for misleading people if you don’t use the tense, according to the post.

Whilst it's true that such a feature does exist in the Turkish language, it may not be fully accurate to describe it as a "gossip tense."

Instead, it's actually a suffix rather than a tense, according to Nicholas Kontovas, Nizami Ganjavi subject librarian and manuscript curator for the Caucasus, Central Asia and Turkey at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.

"Turkish grammar is mostly composed of suffixes. And this one takes the form -mış, -miş, -muş or -müş, depending on vowel harmony," he said. "And it's accurate only in so much as if you were going to gossip about something that you didn't witness firsthand, something in the past, you probably would use it."

"But it's actually a lot more complicated than that," Kontovas added.

The -mış suffix could roughly be translated into English as something like "I heard that". For example, "Ahmet yapmış" would be "(I heard that) Ahmet did it".

These types of suffixes belong to a group known as "evidentials" — a linguistic structure that reveals how the speaker gained knowledge of the information they're sharing.

"Generally speaking, an evidential can say, 'I gained this knowledge firsthand, I gained this knowledge second hand, I gained this knowledge through hearsay'," Kontovas told