Erdem UçarResearch Interests
With a particular interest in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Silk Road, pre-Islamic and Islamic Turkestan, and the history of the Uyghurs and the peoples of the Eurasian steppe. I focus on Old and Middle Turkic linguistics and philology, from the runic inscriptions of the Orkhon valley to Old Uyghur Buddhist and Manichaean manuscripts, and I also work on pre-Islamic Turkic literature and textual traditions. My interests also extend to pre-Ottoman literature and philology, as well as modern Turkish and the broader Turkic languages.
My work spans historical Turkic lexicography, the history and development of Turkic writing systems, and problems of transcription and transliteration in historical Turkic languages. I am also concerned with grammaticalization and emergent grammar in the Turkic languages, the lexical sources of grammatical forms, and constructional change in the historical development of grammatical structures, approached through historical and comparative Turkic linguistics and linguistic typology.
Alongside this, I work on digital humanities and computational approaches to Old Turkic studies, including TEI-based modelling of historical dictionaries and text corpora, OCR and text normalisation, and OpenSearch-based research data infrastructures.
I am also interested in language education and social participation, and in intercultural education and diversity.
Journal of Old Turkic Studies
I founded JOTS in 2017. Nine volumes were published on DergiPark between 2017 and 2025; from 2027 onward the journal is published in print and online by Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart.
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