Home
Hello! Welcome to the my online portfolio.
My name is Nicholas Kontovas, but most people know me as Niko. This is a site where I can share some of the projects I've been working on. Most of what I do relates to language, more specifically those that belong to the Turkic language family. I also sometimes work on other languages spoken in Turkey or other languages in contact with Turkic.
Take a look at the individual sections of this site to the left for more information on particular topics that may interest you!
CV
In this section, you can find up to date information about my educational background, publications, awards, and career trajectory.
Click on one of the subsections below to see what I've been up to. Or, download a PDF of my CV here.
academic interests
Turkic Languages, Iranic Languages, Language in Turkey \& the Ottoman Empire, Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics, Grammaticalization, Language Contact, Lexicography, Semantics, Morphology, Historical Sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Queer Language
educational background
employment history
publications
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2023 [accepted]. `Mu p̌at, e sǩiri!: What is to be done with minority artists in Turkey?'. In Zürcher, E. & Yenen, A. (eds.) 100 Years of the Turkish Republic in 100 Sources. Leiden: Brill.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2023 [accepted]. `Küründen Kabare: Turkish Queer slang out of the brothel and into the streets'. In Zürcher, E. & Yenen, A. (eds.) 100 Years of the Turkish Republic in 100 Sources. Leiden: Brill.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2023 [in print]. `Reflexes of Proto-Iranic *w- as evidence for language contact'. In Pastor, D. & Sulaymanov, M. (eds.) Festschrift for Agnes Korn (title subject to change). Berlin: Reichert.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2022. Language, Identity, and Salience in Literary Medieval Turkic. Uluslararası Yunus Emre ve Dünden Buğüne Türkçe Sempozyumu. 10--11 June 2021, Atatürk Üniversitesi: 268-282.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2022 [in print] . "'You know she didn't have no country': Codeswitching and 'performing sass' in RuPaul's Drag Race". Journal of Language and Sexuality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Shimunek, Andrew, C. Beckwith, J. Washington, N. Kontovas, & K. Niyaz. "The earliest attested Turkic language: The Chieh 羯 (*KƗR) language of the 4th century AD". Journal Asiatique. 303.1 (2015): 143-151.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2019. Review of Central Eurasia in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of Peter B. Golden, by I. Zimony & O. Karatay, eds. 2016. Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI, 1/2.
Kontovas, Nicholas. 2014. Singing around Turkey: An exemplary collection of folk songs. Inner Asian & Uralic National Research Center, Bloomington, Indiana.
Coppola, Marie, E. Spaepen & N. Kontovas. 2006. "Number signs in adult home sign gesture systems." Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR) 9: 9 Congreso International de Aspectos Teóricos das Pesquisas nas Linguas de Sinais. December 6 - 9, 2006, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, SC Brasil: 55-56.
language skills
reading proficiency: Chaghatay, Crimean Tatar, Classical Arabic, Classical Persian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Khwarazmian Turkic, Middle Kipchak, Old Anatolian Turkish, Old Uyghur, Ottoman, Qarakhanid, Volga Tatar
basic reading knowledge: Classical Armenian, Classical Chinese, Classical Mongolian, Koine Greek, Latin, Middle Persian
certifications
professional skills training
programming, scripting, and markup
awards, grants, and recognition
courses taught
academic service and administration
talks
invited talks
The shifting tides of local linguistic prestige and their impact on the development of Central Asian Turkic
conference presentations
(with Jonathan North Washington & Andrew Shimunek)
(with Jonathan North Washington & Andrew Shimunek)
guest lectures
seminars
The Eastern Turkī Glossary
'Eastern Turkī' is a term that is sometimes used to describe the varieties of Turkic commonly written and spoken in Eastern Turkistan (i.e. the Jungar and Tarim basins) before the reforms in language and script that brought about Standard Modern Uyghur. It is a sort of late-stage Chaghatay or early form of Modern Uyghur; the degree of archaism or (conversely) influence from local spoken language will depend on the text.
Back in 2015, my friend Eric Schluessel and I developed a searchable, digital version of a few glossaries written by travellers to the region in the early 20th century. We've since supplemented those glossaries with a few entries of our own, resulting in the Eastern Turkic Glossary project.
The ETG is far from a full dictionary of Chaghatay — or even Eastern Turkī — but we hope it can help those trying to read documents in pre-modern forms of written Eastern Turkic!
Nenapuna.net: A Laz Dictionary Project
Laz is a South Caucasian (a.k.a. Kartvelian) language, spoken mostly on the shores of the Black Sea in what is now northeastern Turkey and a small adjacent part of the Georgian Republic. It is distantly related to Georgian, but much more closely related to Megrelian, spoken mostly in northwestern Georgia.
In 2016 I started digitizing the (out of print) Laz-Turkish-English Temel Lazca Sözlük, compiled by İsmail Avcı Bucaǩlişi Eylem Bostancı and published by the (now defunct) Lazika Yayın Kollektifi in 2014. The site as it stands is still in its early stages, but it remains one of the most accurate and comprehensive online searchable dictionaries of Laz.
In the future, I hope to fix some issues with the matching of examples for certain synonyms and suppletive forms which didn't always match up in a logical fashion when the original text files were digitized. I would also love to add etymological and/or grammatical information for more entries, but this would require major funding.
Resources for Ottoman Turkish
Ottoman (a.k.a. Ottoman Turkish) is the blanket term given to the written Turkic of the Ottoman Empire from its inception to the script reform officially adopted by the Turkish Republic between 1928 and 1929.
I have been teaching Ottoman for about ten years now. To date, I've done so in workshop format at Indiana University Bloomington, and as a regular academic year course at Leiden University and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Along the way to help students out, I have developed a number of resources, some of which I share below. Note that both these resources are written in Modern Turkish!
Note that all these materials are covered under variations of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0. Feel free to use them for any non-commercial purposes. Additionally, if you would credit me as you do so, I would really appreciate it!
ʿOs̠mānlıca Añlamaḳ
While working as a lecturerin the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Boğaziçi, one of my main duties was the instruction of introductory Ottoman. During my four years there, I developed a number of handouts which I eventually compiled into a small booklet. The booklet is far from a complete textbook, but it should prove useful to those teaching/learning Ottoman from a Modern Turkish background. You can find a copy in PDF here.
Osmanlıca İrfan Bahçesi
Along with ʿOs̠mānlıca Añlamaḳ above, I also made an online curriculum for Ottoman to be used hand-in-hand with the booklet. This curriculum changed every semester, but you can find the version from the last time I gave this course here. It's not very practical for general use, but I hope to change that -- and update the technology -- in the future.
Resources for Modern Uyghur
Modern Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken by around 20 million people worldwide, concentrated mostly in the southern half of Eastern Turkistan, a.k.a. the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. It belongs to the Southeastern (a.k.a. Qarluq, Chaghataid) branch of Turkic, and is closely related to Uzbek.
I have tought Modern Uyghur grammar as an elective course at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Leiden University, and the Leiden Summer School for Languages and Linguistics. My deep love of Uyghur began at Indiana University Bloomington, where I did my Masters under (inter alia) Dr. Gülnisa Nazarova. Those interested in learning to speak and read Uyghur fluently should try to study there at some point; the quality of Uyghur instruction is unparalleled!
For those who want to take a look at Uyghur, or those already studying it who might want some additional input, feel free to check out the resources I made below. Note that all these materials are covered under variations of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0. Feel free to use them for any non-commercial purposes. Additionally, if you would credit me as you do so, I would really appreciate it!
Modern Uyghur Poetry Reader
I prepared this poetry reader as a final project for an advanced independent study semester in Modern Uyghur during my Masters at Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Central Eurasian Studies. Each poem is accompanied by an English translation, along with notes on grammar and vocabulary for students of the Uyghur language. You can download a PDF of it here.
All translations and notes are done by me, and looked over by native speaker and renowned Uyghur instructor, Dr. Gülnisa Nazarova.
Uyghurche Oqush: Reading Uyghur
While teaching Uyghur grammar at the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics, I created a small packet for those interested in reading and writing Uyghur in the official version of the Arabic script used by most Uyghurs today. You can find a PDF of that packet here.
Hazirqi Zaman Uyghur Tili: Elementary Modern Uyghur vocab online
As an auditory learner, I sympathise with students who want to be able to listen to vocabulary as they practice it at home. For that reason, I prepared this short Modern Uyghur Language site. The modules correspond roughly to the first few chapters of Nazarova's Elementary Uyghur, but can be used to supplement any introductory Uyghur language course.
Contact
The best way to contact me is via my work email. To avoid spam, I won't put it here, but you can find it easily on my university homepage.
You can also add me on LinkedIn!