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

The Turkish language has gone viral on social media for a particular trait: a tense that you can supposedly use specifically for gossip.

Transcript

00:00What is Turkish's gossip tense and how does it work?

00:09The Turkish language has gone viral on social media for a particular trait,

00:13a tense that you can use specifically for gossip.

00:16This post on X says you can use the gossip tense to talk about events you haven't witnessed yourself,

00:21emphasising that what you're talking about is just hearsay.

00:24You can also be judged for misleading people if you don't use the tense, according to the post.

00:29And it's true that such a feature does exist in the Turkish language,

00:32but how accurate is it to call it a gossip tense?

01:00The so-called gossip tense is what linguists call an evidential rather than a tense,

01:05and essentially it isn't just used for gossip,

01:08it's used for any sort of knowledge that you've gained indirectly or that you doubt, among other things.

01:13It's not just in Turkish either, other languages such as Mongolian and Tajik have structures like this too.

01:19What does it mean though for news reporting,

01:21and does it lay any pitfalls for the potential spread of misinformation?

01:29Not to use the mishpa itself, because as an authoritative journalist you don't want to be doing that.

01:34So again, the best journalism in Turkish avoids situations

01:37where you're trying to communicate information you got from other sources

01:41with sort of unambiguously either direct or indirect verb forms whatsoever.

01:46For more, head over to Euronews.com