In a recent announcement, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) declared ("crowded loneliness" ("kalabalık yalnızlık") as the word and concept of the year 2024. Approximately one million people participated in the public voting organized by the TDK, according to Karar.
The words and concepts presented for voting included crowded loneliness ("kalabalık yalnızlık"), compassion ("merhamet"), alienation ("yabancılaşma"), algorithm ("algoritma"), corruption ("yozlaşma"), artificial intelligence ("yapay zeka"), and digital fatigue ("dijital yorgunluk"), according to Takvim.
The Evaluation Committee, formed by the Turkish Language Association and Ankara University's Communication Research and Application Center (İLAUM), analyzed the significance of these terms in contemporary society.
"The terms 'loneliness' (yalnızlık), which expresses singularity, and 'crowd' (kalabalık), which expresses plurality, can coexist simultaneously," the Evaluation Committee stated, according to Diken. They further explained that this paradoxical situation manifests in individuals' daily lives and the types of relationships they establish.
"In social media environments, the importance of follower and like counts—the creation of a so-called 'crowded' environment—is perceived as a solution to the feeling of loneliness, but it produces a result that increases the feeling of loneliness," the committee noted, according to NTV. "The transient relationships proposed by the digital world deepen the feeling of loneliness."
"The fact that there are many people around an individual does not mean that they do not feel lonely. Having family members in the same house does not prevent feeling lonely at the same dining table," the Evaluation Committee emphasized, according to Milliyet.
In the Netflix documentary "Terim," Fatih Terim, a renowned Turkish football manager, used the expression "I am a very crowded lonely person" ("Ben çok kalabalık bir yalnızım"), which went viral, reported Sözcü. Billboards across Istanbul featured Terim's famous quotes, further popularizing the term.
According to Haberler, the selection of "crowded loneliness" as the word of the year is associated with an increase in research studies showing that people feel lonely even in crowded environments, exacerbated by the effects of the digital world and weakened social ties.
Oxford chose "brain rot" as the word of 2024, a 170-year-old term that has gained a new meaning on social media. The term "brain rot" is defined as "the deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, seen as a result of excessive consumption of materials considered especially unimportant or not challenging."
Similarly, Cambridge Dictionary's chosen word for 2024 is "manifest." "The word 'manifest' was searched more than 130,000 times in the dictionary in 2024 and its usage on all social media platforms increased significantly," stated Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Director of Cambridge Dictionary.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.