ASOT v1: Atlas of Spoken Ottoman Turkish

Project code: DTCH-PRD-2026-P001

ASOT v1: Atlas of Spoken Ottoman Turkish
Pronunciation Records, Colloquial Usage and Open Cultural Heritage Data

ASOT is a digital-philological spoken language atlas project that examines European orientalists’ conversation manuals for Ottoman Turkish. The project aims to make visible the representations of Ottoman spoken language across different sources by analysing dialogues, formulaic expressions, proverbs, idioms, everyday vocabulary lists, and pronunciation-oriented renderings within a comparative data structure.

ASOT traces how Ottoman Turkish was written, represented, and vocalised in these conversation manuals through three interconnected layers: Arabic-script Ottoman Turkish spelling, the Latin-script rendering shaped by each author’s own pronunciation system, and the explanatory notes that guide this rendering. These three layers are kept together within the same data structure, allowing the relationships between writing, pronunciation, explanation, and usage context to be compared across sources.

The project brings together dialogues, forms of greeting and address, everyday conversational formulae, repertoires of proverbs and idioms, and vocabulary related to daily life in a shared example bank while preserving the identity of each source. In this way, it becomes possible to trace how the manuals represent Ottoman spoken language across different situations, social contexts, and pragmatic functions.

ASOT proposes a digital research model that enables the systematic comparison of the circulation of formulaic language, pronunciation-based rendering strategies, and the changing representations of spoken language across sources. In this respect, the project develops a digital-philological atlas reading that evaluates materials related to the spoken use of Ottoman Turkish through the relationship between text, pronunciation, explanation, context, and communicative function.