Linguistic variation beyond the Indo-European web: Analyzing Turkish web registers in TurCORE

What is it about?

The internet is one of the first sources people turn to when seeking information. It contains a wide variety of text types, known as web registers, such as news reports, interactive discussions, and recipes. While registers have been extensively studied in European languages, this study introduces a collection of Turkish online texts called the Turkish Corpus of Online Registers (TurCORE) - the first of its kind for Turkish. This collection includes 2,780 texts, grouped into 24 categories. Along with providing an overview of these categories in the Turkish web context, the study compares how Turkish and English use the different types of texts, highlighting cultural elements in interactive discussions and recipes.

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Why is it important?

Studying registers is important because, without such research, the purposes and functions of online texts might become unclear, reducing media literacy and raising concerns about the reliability of internet use. Moreover, registers reveal how language and culture interact in meaningful ways. Beyond these important insights, TurCORE stands out as the first web register corpus for Turkish and one of the few existing for other languages, including English and Finnish.

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