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Article published In:
Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 5:1 (2024) ► pp.91–103

Corpus-based variationist linguistics

Lexical change in a century in Turkish

ORCID logo | Adana Alparslan Türkeş Science and Technology UniversityAdana
This paper aims to identify what archaic words/word groups were still known and used both among language speakers and Turkish National Corpus (TNC) as an indication of lexical change in Turkish from 1900 to 2020. The present study explores the diachronic variation of lexical change in Turkish by combining the corpus-based variationist sociolinguistic approach with the perspective of historical sociolinguistics. The words/collocations thought to be outdated from the original version of “Eylül” novel, written in 1900, were selected and randomly subsampled using a computer-based randomization algorithm. A survey was formed using the outdated words/collocations along with the context. The results indicated that demographical variables did not affect word knowledge and that the archaic words were unfamiliar to all participants uniformly. The overall comparison of words/collocations tested in TNC and survey indicated similar results as the most and the least frequently used words were also the most and least abundantly present in TNC.
Keywords: language change, variationist sociolinguistics, corpus-based approach, historical sociolinguistics, Eylül
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Data collection tool
    • 2.3Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results and discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 5 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.23005.uns
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