Wikilala

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Wikilala is a Turkish digital library that collects Ottoman Turkish texts. It’s nicknamed the Google of Ottoman Turkish. Launched in 2019 by historians Sadi Özgür and Harun Tuncer, it is based in Istanbul and serves users worldwide. The site now has more than 109,000 items, including 45,000 newspapers, 32,000 journals, 4,000 books and 26,000 articles. It offers full‑text search in both the Ottoman Turkish and Turkish alphabets.

Documents are digitized by high‑resolution scanning, then processed with OCR to extract text and indexed so they can be searched in Latin and Arabic scripts. A notable digitized work is el-Hazînetü'l-Azîziye fi'l-Lügati'l-Osmâniyye, a 10‑volume dictionary by Sir James Redhouse that had been lost for a time.

Since its launch, Wikilala has attracted over 200,000 visitors from 107 countries. The platform is accessible at wikilala.com with registration and institutional subscriptions. In 2021 it won the Innovative Initiative of the Year Award from Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism for preserving Ottoman history.