Change in Letter Frequencies in Turkish - Part 2 - Letters â î û

Before I compiled the data, I was expecting to see change in frequencies of the letters â î û. These are versions of the letters a i u with a circumflex. Sure enough their use have been increasing since 2003. This change will continue for more years to come.

The change can be explained by a variety of reasons.
- Öz Türkçe movement is not as strong nowadays.
- People in Turkey are less ideologically motivated. They are less hostile to the historical Turkish language, pronunciation, and vocabulary
- Technological changes like modern operating systems and hardware make it easy to use them.



The change is easier to see in the following graph which shows frequency changes compared to the year 2001.




The preface of Türkçe İmlâ Kılavuzu (Turkish Spelling Guide) from Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Association) contains a section about the history of the guide. It says the the spelling rules were changed in 1965, 1970, 1977, 1982, 1985, 2000. Needless to say the rules regarding the use of düzeltme işareti (circumflex) is described as the main change in multiple revisions.

Notes
- Frequencies are computed from Hurriyet and Zaman newspapers using columnist articles between 2001 and 2011.

Data:

Letter frequencies in percent
    2001  2002  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011
â  0.060 0.052 0.050 0.052 0.054 0.056 0.065 0.070 0.073 0.069 0.075
î  0.013 0.008 0.006 0.010 0.011 0.012 0.015 0.019 0.020 0.015 0.017
û  0.004 0.003 0.003 0.004 0.003 0.004 0.004 0.006 0.006 0.005 0.005

Continued from Part 1