Identifying linguistic trends in Kazakh: A corpus-based and survey analysis of the Word of the Year 2024

Abstract

The Word of the Year (WOTY) is an annual campaign summarizing the trends of the year in the linguistic dimension. This study explores the selection of the WOTY 2024 in the Kazakh language using a mixed-method approach that combines public voting and corpus-based frequency analysis. Comparative analysis across linguistic cultures indicated the absence of English WOTYs (brain rot, manifest, brat, polarization) in Kazakh texts, while Russian WOTYs mir ‘world/peace’ and iskustvennyi intellekt ‘artificial intelligence’ were present. A survey of 220 respondents identified jasandy intellekt ‘artificial intelligence’, uaqytty auystyru ‘time shift’, and su tasqyny ‘flood’ as the most prominent candidates. Complementing this, a research corpus of 500 Kazakh-language news publications was compiled and analyzed using #LancsBox 6.0 software. The corpus revealed high frequencies for äiel ‘woman’, jasandy intellekt ‘artificial intelligence’, and su tasqyny ‘flood’, etc. The convergence of survey and corpus data led to the identification of jasandy intellekt ‘artificial intelligence’ as the most representative WOTY in Kazakh for 2024. Additional lexical patterns in the corpus reflect social concerns and digital influence. The contribution is a comprehensive dataset – a research corpus comprising 500 media texts, totaling 380,349 tokens sourced from Kazakhstani online news platforms for the year 2024. The study highlights the effectiveness of combining linguistic research tools with public engagement and calls for future interdisciplinary collaboration between linguists and NLP specialists to enhance WOTY identification.