Cuma Kazancı

Dr. Cuma Kazancı is Lecturer of Turkish in the Seminar für Turkologie und Zentralasienkunde at the University of Göttingen, where he has taught since 2008. In parallel he instructed German as a Foreign Language at the university’s Institut für Interkulturelle Kommunikation (2010-2019) and held earlier teaching appointments at Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences and the University of Göttingen’s DaF programme.

Research focus: His work lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Turkish studies, with particular emphasis on Turkish-German bilingualism, code-switching, intercultural pragmatics, and the language of political discourse. A central theme is how minority speakers negotiate identity and how majority institutions linguistically frame migration.

He completed his doctorate in 2011 with a dissertation analysing parliamentary debates on immigration, asylum and citizenship law (1990-1994), revealing strategies of linguistic inclusion and exclusion toward Turkish migrants. Subsequent articles explore creative loanword use, mixed-language phenomena among youth, and terminological challenges within Turkish linguistics.

Supervision & outreach: Kazancı regularly supervises BA and MA theses on bilingual development, Turkish diaspora education, and literary analyses. He organised the 2019 symposium on language contact in Turkic languages and maintains an active conference profile, most recently speaking on bilingual youth communication and AI applications in heritage-language research.

His publications combine empirical discourse analysis with theoretical contributions to contact linguistics, making him a key figure in contemporary Turkish-German sociolinguistic studies.