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| Conceptual logo for Ad Derneği proposed by me (!), an unofficial visual interpretation inspired by Turkic onomastics, historical scripts, maps, and scholarly tradition. |
A new institutional voice has appeared in international name studies. Ad Derneği - literally the Name Society / Association for Names - was established in İzmir, Türkiye, at the beginning of 2026, with the stated purpose of addressing what its founders see as two important gaps in Turkic onomastics: the absence of a scholarly body able to encourage the systematic collection, analysis, and publication of onomastic material across the Turkic world, and the lack of a specialized academic journal providing a common forum for this research.
The establishment of the Society is therefore potentially more significant than the creation of yet another national learned association. Its declared intellectual horizon is explicitly transnational: the aim is to bring together researchers working on the naming systems of Turkic peoples across different countries and scholarly traditions, while also connecting this research with international onomastics.
Why a new Name Society?
The programmatic statement published in the inaugural issue of Adbilim is unusually explicit about the motivation behind the initiative. It recognizes that Turkic onomastics already has a substantial scholarly tradition and researchers working throughout the Turkic world, but argues that this work has often remained geographically and institutionally dispersed.
According to the founders, what has been missing is an institution capable of encouraging researchers to approach this enormous body of naming material from a shared and comparative perspective - collecting it, analysing it, developing appropriate theories and methods, and transforming it into accessible scholarly publications.
This point deserves attention. The proposed focus is not simply on producing more inventories of personal names or place names. The Society’s intellectual programme stresses that the future development of Turkic onomastics depends equally upon theory, methodology, comparison, and interdisciplinary interpretation. Its journal consequently welcomes research not only on anthroponyms and toponyms, but also on community names, celestial names, plant and animal names, commercial names, festival names, and other categories within the expanding onomastic system.
In this sense, Ad Derneği seems to envisage onomastics not merely as the collection of names, but as the study of naming as a linguistic, historical, cultural, geographical, social, and even ecological phenomenon.
An İzmir-based society with an international horizon
At present, however, one should distinguish carefully between what is publicly documented about the Society itself and what is documented about its journal. I have not found a publicly accessible statute, complete membership list, separate governing-board page, exact legal registration date, or detailed programme of future Society activities. The journal website is currently the principal public window into the new organization. It would therefore be premature to identify the journal’s entire editorial or advisory board automatically as the governing body of Ad Derneği.
What can already be seen, nevertheless, is a substantial international academic network around the initiative.
The Adbilim editorial and advisory structure includes scholars affiliated with institutions in Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Russia, and North Macedonia. Among them are specialists such as Zhazira Agabekova, Bekzhan Abdualiuly, Kızdarkhan Risbergen, Magripa Eskeyeva, Burul Saginbayeva, Kadırali Konkobayev, Nosirjon Ulukov, Reyhan Habibli, Anna Dybo, and many Turkish scholars of language, history, naming, and related disciplines.
This international composition matters: it indicates that the Society’s declared idea of connecting onomasticians across national boundaries is already reflected, at least at the level of its scholarly publication.
A longer story behind the new Society
Although Ad Derneği itself is new, the scholarly network surrounding it did not appear suddenly in 2026.
An important precursor can be seen in the series of International Onomastics Symposia (Uluslararası Adbilim Sempozyumu) that brought together researchers from different parts of the Turkic world.
The First International Onomastics Symposium was organized online by Ege University’s Institute of Turkic World Studies on 22–24 April 2021. Its organizing and scientific committees already included scholars from Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, Yakutia, Hungary, Iraq, and elsewhere. İbrahim Şahin played an important role in its organization, and the proceedings were later published by Ege University.
The second meeting followed in 2022, organized through cooperation between Ege University and Nazarbayev University, with scholars from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan participating in the organization.
The series continued with a third meeting in 2023, involving Namangan State University in Uzbekistan and Ege University, and a fourth in December 2025, this time held under the auspices of the Turkish Language Association (Türk Dil Kurumu) in Ankara. The TDK itself described the sequence as a continuing international platform intended to bring together researchers of the common naming heritage of Turkic peoples, discuss problems in the field, and encourage scholarly cooperation.
I have found no official statement saying that Ad Derneği is formally the institutional successor to these symposia, so that claim should not be made. Yet the continuity of people, subject matter, and international contacts is difficult to overlook. The Society can reasonably be understood as emerging within an already developing scholarly network that had been taking shape for several years.
Adbilim: the Society acquires a scholarly voice
The most visible achievement of Ad Derneği so far is its official journal, Adbilim.
Its first issue - Volume 1, No. 1 - appeared on 30 June 2026. The journal describes itself as an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of onomastics. It publishes twice annually, in June and December, accepts original research in Turkish and English, uses double-blind peer review, and charges authors no submission, review, or publication fees.
Its publication policies are already comparatively detailed. Submitted articles are expected to follow an IMRAD-type research structure; authors must use internationally recognized onomastic terminology; historical and Turkic-language material should follow appropriate transcription standards; field research requires ethics approval; and similarity reports are required, with specified thresholds. The journal uses APA 7 for references and asks authors to provide precise morphological segmentation when analysing names.
The articles are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, making the scholarship freely accessible.
What does the first issue tell us?
The inaugural issue is particularly revealing because it demonstrates what the new Society understands by a genuinely broad Turkic onomastics.
It contains eight research articles, together with a biographical contribution and an opinion/theoretical article. Topics include Ottoman and historical Turkic toponymy, sixteenth-century personal names, Kazakh anthroponymy, Arabic-origin names in Kazakhstan, urbanonymy, historical naming traditions, and broader theoretical questions. It also includes a study devoted to the legacy of Ernst Begmatov, a central figure in Uzbek onomastics, and a proposal for an emerging field of ecological onomastics.
Kazakh onomastics is especially prominent. Articles examine the historical formation of the Kazakh anthroponymic system, Arabic-origin Kazakh personal names across long-term cultural transmission, and the semantic development of bay in Kazakh personal naming.
This is significant because it shows that the project is not conceived simply as a journal about names in Türkiye. Its real geographical frame is much broader: the interconnected onomastic traditions of the Turkic world.
From “Turkic onomastics” to international onomastics
Perhaps the most important sentence in the Society’s founding statement is the ambition to examine the common onomastic heritage of Turkic peoples holistically and thereby contribute to world onomastics.
That second half is crucial. A specialized society devoted to Turkic naming traditions could easily become inward-looking. The programme associated with Ad Derneği points in the opposite direction. Adbilim explicitly welcomes studies of naming processes in different languages and cultures, comparative investigations, theoretical contributions, and interdisciplinary approaches.
This creates possibilities well beyond traditional Turkology: comparison of surname systems across migration settings; standardization of onomastic terminology; digital gazetteers and name databases; corpus-based anthroponymy; minority and multilingual naming; ecological names; political and historical renaming; cultural landscapes; and comparative analyses linking Turkic evidence to broader theories of names and naming.
Why the creation of Ad Derneği matters
The appearance of a dedicated society is important because a scholarly field needs more than individual researchers. It needs institutions capable of preserving continuity between generations, creating common standards, bringing datasets together, organizing meetings, publishing results, and giving younger scholars a recognizable professional community.
Turkic onomastics is particularly suited to such cooperation. Personal names, ethnonyms, place names, tribal names and other onymic categories routinely cross today’s state borders. Their histories connect Anatolia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga-Ural region and other territories. Studying them exclusively within modern national frameworks can therefore conceal precisely the historical relationships that comparative onomastics is capable of revealing.
Ad Derneği’s ambition to build a common scholarly space without abandoning local linguistic traditions may consequently prove to be its most valuable contribution.
At the same time, the Society is still at the beginning of its institutional life. It will be interesting to see whether it develops its own regular conferences, research projects, databases, working groups, terminology initiatives, student programmes, or formal cooperation with established organizations such as the International Council of Onomastic Sciences and national name societies.
Those next steps are not yet documented publicly, and it is better to regard them as possibilities rather than announced plans.
A new institution worth watching
For the moment, what can be stated with confidence is already noteworthy.
Ad Derneği was established in İzmir in early 2026 specifically to create an institutional framework for the development of onomastics, particularly across the Turkic world. Its first major scholarly instrument, Adbilim, has already begun publication as an international, open-access, double-blind-reviewed journal with an editorial network extending across several countries.
Behind this new institution stands a longer history of international onomastic cooperation developed through the symposium series beginning at Ege University in 2021. While the formal relationship between that series and the new Society has not been stated, the emergence of Ad Derneği appears to represent an important stage in the gradual institutionalization of this scholarly network.
For the international onomastic community, this deserves attention. The Turkic-speaking world contains an extraordinary variety of naming systems, archives, linguistic traditions, historical strata and contemporary naming transformations. A society capable of connecting these materials systematically — and of placing them in dialogue with international theory and methodology — could fill a genuine gap.
Welcome, Ad Derneği, to the international family of name societies.
Adbilim — official journal website
About Adbilim and its aims
Explore the inaugural issue, Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)
