Ottomanspeaking

Ottomanspeaking refers to the historical use of Ottoman Turkish as the administrative and literary lingua franca of the Ottoman Empire. From roughly the 14th century until the early 20th century, this form of Turkish served as the state language in governance, law, diplomacy, education, and high culture, while many local languages remained in everyday use across the empire.

Linguistically, Ottoman Turkish combined Turkish grammar with a substantial reservoir of Persian and Arabic loanwords. It was written in a variant of the Arabic script that included additional characters to represent Turkish phonology. The literary and bureaucratic style was ornate, with specialized terminology, honorifics, and a formal register common in court decrees, religious works, and scholarly literature.

Socially, ottomanspeaking functioned as a prestige and administrative language, but it was not the sole mother tongue of most inhabitants. Local languages were widely spoken alongside it, and literacy rates varied by region and period. The empire’s education system and state apparatus promoted Ottoman Turkish as a unifying medium for administration and discourse.

The decline of the form culminated in language reforms after the empire’s end and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Beginning in the 1920s, Turkish underwent spelling and lexical reforms and, in 1928, the alphabet shifted to a Latin script. This transition reduced the use of Ottoman Turkish in official life, while its historical legacy remains in literature and archival records.

See also: Ottoman Turkish, Turkish language, Language policy of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish nationalism.