Dear colleagues!
Turkic Studies Journal (Astana, Kazakhstan) invites you to participate in a special issue, to be published in the second quarter of 2026, on the topic "Textology of Turkic Written Monuments."
We use a broad understanding of "textology" as a term denoting a wide variety of studies that enable us to read and reproduce the TEXT of a historical written monument and understand its MEANING, thereby obtaining information about the culture, history, and worldview of the Turkic ethnic groups—the speakers of the languages in which these monuments are written.
Such studies can cover the various types of script in which the monuments were written: runic monuments, texts in Sogdian, Uighur, Manichaean, Syriac, Arabic scripts, texts in Brahmi and Tibetan scripts, texts written in Latin and Armenian scripts, various types of Cyrillic script, and so on.
Such research is not limited to the earliest medieval written documents in Turkic languages. The following criterion is important: the text under study can be assessed as a historical monument of a specific Turkic language. For languages that developed writing in the relatively recent past (for example, in the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries), such historical linguistic monuments include their first recordings or publications in these languages—materials collected by researchers and recorded using various types of scientific transcriptions, as well as the first primers, dictionaries, grammars, or missionary translations of religious books into these languages (for example, the Bible or the Quran).
The article may, in particular, address issues related to the following research tasks.
1) Work on deciphering the text itself:
- Recognizing characters in poorly preserved texts,
- Problems of "restoring" lost fragments,
- Orthographic features of the script used (character inventory, variability of their forms, their meanings, features of their combinatorics, spelling rules),
- Transliteration and transcription of the text of the monument,
- Study of its phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features,
- Translation and interpretation of the text;
2) Intertextual studies:
- defining the genre of a given text,
- identifying genre features inherent in a body of texts of this genre,
- identifying commonplaces (e.g., epic formulas in epic texts) and typical text components and their modes of expression (e.g., expressions of sorrow and regret in epigraphic texts),
- comparing a given text version (e.g., a copy of a well-known sutra) with existing versions to identify their discrepancies and individual characteristics, etc.;
3) Comparative linguistic studies based on the text;
4) Historical and cultural interpretation of the text.
Please send the article, formatted according to the journal's guidelines, to the following addresses:
Article submission deadline: April 1, 2026
Articles will be peer-reviewed according to the journal's guidelines. The editors reserve the right to reject articles that are not within the scope of the issue or that have been rejected by reviewers.
