As a multifaceted concept, metaphor is the product of consciousness, perception, and thought. Unlike existing studies, this study's starting point is to determine the associations evoked in students' minds by a dialect prominent in education, official correspondence, and mass communication in terms of its language manifestations. Therefore, the aim of this study is to collect metaphors related to the concept of standard Turkish (Istanbul Turkish) created by students learning Turkish as their native language and to reveal the perceptions of middle school students by classifying the collected metaphors under various categories. The research was designed according to phenomenology, a qualitative design. The study group consisted of (157) eighth-grade middle school students. Content analysis was used to analyze the collected data, and artificial intelligence tools were utilized in this analysis. The findings were grouped under nine different themes. The metaphors obtained in the study can be interpreted as reflecting the students’ love for Turkish and how richly they perceive the language in its different aspects.
Metaphor, Istanbul Turkish, phenomenology.