Turkronicles: Diachronic Resources for the Fast Evolving Turkish Language

TL;DR

This study introduces Turkronicles, a diachronic Turkish corpus from official gazettes, and analyzes linguistic evolution in Turkish since 1923, revealing vocabulary divergence and changes in writing conventions over time.

Contribution

The paper presents Turkronicles, a new diachronic corpus for Turkish, and provides a comprehensive analysis of language changes driven by historical and governmental influences.

Findings

Vocabulary divergence increases with time.

New words replace old counterparts.

Writing conventions, like circumflex usage, decrease.

Abstract

Over the past century, the Turkish language has undergone substantial changes, primarily driven by governmental interventions. In this work, our goal is to investigate the evolution of the Turkish language since the establishment of T\"urkiye in 1923. Thus, we first introduce Turkronicles which is a diachronic corpus for Turkish derived from the Official Gazette of T\"urkiye. Turkronicles contains 45,375 documents, detailing governmental actions, making it a pivotal resource for analyzing the linguistic evolution influenced by the state policies. In addition, we expand an existing diachronic Turkish corpus which consists of the records of the Grand National Assembly of T\"urkiye by covering additional years. Next, combining these two diachronic corpora, we seek answers for two main research questions: How have the Turkish vocabulary and the writing conventions changed since the 1920s? Our analysis reveals that the vocabularies of two different time periods diverge more as the time between them increases, and newly coined Turkish words take the place of their old counterparts. We also observe changes in writing conventions. In particular, the use of circumflex noticeably decreases and words ending with the letters "-b" and "-d" are successively replaced with "-p" and "-t" letters, respectively. Overall, this study quantitatively highlights the dramatic changes in Turkish from various aspects of the language in a diachronic perspective.