A Corpus-Based Approach in Vocabulary Research: Defining the Word of the Year 2023 in Kazakh

The Word of the Year (WOTY) is an event held in various countries and regions to determine the most relevant, significant, and popular words and expressions that reflect not only the linguistic but also the socio-cultural aspects of the country. This paper aims to identify the most frequently used words/phrases in Kazakh for 2023 to be nominated for the WOTY title. The research methods include media discourse analysis and quantitative analysis using a corpus-based approach. A computer program, #LancsBox 6.0, generated a dataset—a research corpus consisting of 500 texts published on Kazakh news platforms throughout 2023. The results indicated that: 1) the conjunction “jáne” [and] had the highest frequency and occurrence in the research corpus; 2) the extracted words with high frequency indicators might serve as candidates for WOTY 2023, such as “Kazakhstan”, “jana” [new], “jyly” [year], “kerek” [need], “jumys [work]”; 3) WOTY “artificial intelligence” named by other global sources showed a high frequency indicator in Kazakh media texts. The study contributed with the generated corpus of media texts in Kazakh for 2023. The significance of our study is highlighted by the pioneering linguistic assessment in Kazakh language, which involves the analysis of media discourse publications based on corpus outcomes.