Mehmet Ölmez

Mehmet Ölmez (born 31 March 1963) is a Turkish linguist, academic, and Turkologist.

Life Early years Ölmez was born on March 31, 1963, in the town of Uçhisar, Nevşehir. He completed his primary and secondary education between 1968 and 1969 in Uçhisar and Nevşehir.

Academic life In 1980, Ölmez enrolled in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Hacettepe University. He studied English in the preparatory program for one year. In 1985, he graduated by completing his undergraduate thesis titled The Dialect of Uçhisar, Nevşehir Province: Analysis, Texts, and Dictionary, which focused on the local dialect of Nevşehir. The same year, he began his master's studies in the same department.

Between March 1986 and May 1987, he worked as an assistant expert at the Turkish Language Association.

In 1987, he joined the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Hacettepe University as a research assistant. Under the supervision of Professor Dr. Talat Tekin, he completed his master's thesis titled The Third Book (Fifth Chapter) of the Uyghur Altun Yaruk.

During his doctoral studies, which he began in 1988, he won the DAAD scholarship and went to Germany in August 1991. After completing his German language courses, he began his doctoral research between 1991 and 1993 in Giessen under the supervision of Professor Dr. Klaus Röhrborn, focusing on The Sixth Chapter of Hsüan-Tsang's Biography in Old Uighur. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1994 under the supervision of Professor Dr. Talat Tekin.

At the same time, he studied Sanskrit under Professor Dr. H. Bechert in the Department of Indology and Classical Mongolian under Professor Dr. G. Doerfer in the Department of Mongolistics.

He received the title of Associate Professor in 1995 and became a Full Professor in 2001.

Until 1998, Mehmet Ölmez worked at Hacettepe University. Between 1998 and 2000, he served as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Turkology at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. From 2000 to 2001, he worked as a faculty member at Mersin University. Between 2001 and 2018, he served as a faculty member at Yıldız Technical University. During this period, he was also a visiting lecturer at Boğaziçi University, where he taught in the Center for Asian Studies, the Department of Turkish Language and Literature, and the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. In February 2018, he was appointed to the Department of Contemporary Turkic Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University, where he currently serves as the Head of the Department.

In addition to his proficiency in English and German, he is able to work comfortably with sources in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. He has a strong command of many Turkic languages—not only grammatically but also at a conversational level—especially Tuvan and Modern Uyghur. His research primarily focuses on Old Uyghur, runic inscriptions, Siberian Turkic languages, and Mongolian.

Since 1992, Mehmet Ölmez has been a member of the Societas Uralo-Altaica, and since 2017, a member of the Academia Europaea.

Family He has been married to Prof. Dr. Zühal Kargı Ölmez since October 1991, and they have one child.

Selected publications Some of the published books by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ölmez are as follows:

Writings about him