FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism is “selfie”. It achieved global prominence with the proliferation of smartphones and was designated Word of the Year in 2013 by Oxford University Press. In Turkish, it is rendered as “özçekim” and was incorporated into the dictionary of “Türk Dil Kurumu” in 2014. The term exemplifies how technological innovation and digital self-representation expedite lexical transformation.

I am an associate professor at Sinop University, Türkiye, in the Department of Turkish Language Education. I completed my MSc and PhD in the same field at Sakarya University. Throughout my academic training, I received systematic instruction in linguistics, lexicology, semantics, morphology, and vocabulary teaching. My research focuses on Turkish as a second/foreign language, bilingual education, and vocabulary development in multilingual contexts. In my doctoral research on digital storytelling and in nationally funded projects on digital literacy and language education, I examined evolving language use in digital environments. Moreover, my studies analysing keywords in postgraduate theses and conceptual perceptions in language education reflect an ongoing engagement with lexical change and terminological variation. These experiences have strengthened both my theoretical grounding in lexical studies and my applied expertise in vocabulary instruction, which are directly relevant to research on neology and lexical innovation. More about me here, here, and here.