What was the lingua franca of the Ottoman Empire?
Languages of the Ottoman Empire
The language of the court and government of the Ottoman Empire was Ottoman Turkish, but many other languages were in contemporary use in parts of the empire. Although the minorities of the Ottoman Empire were free to use their language amongst themselves, if they needed to communicate with the government they had to use Ottoman Turkish.
Ottoman Empire
The Christian population of the empire, owing to their higher educational levels, started to pull ahead of the Muslim majority, leading to much resentment on the part of the latter. In 1861, there were 571 primary and 94 secondary schools for Ottoman Christians with 140,000 pupils in total, a figure that vastly exceeded the number of Muslim children in school at the same time, who were further hindered by the amount of time spent learning Arabic and Islamic theology. Stone further suggested that the Arabic alphabet, which Turkish was written in until 1928, was very ill-suited to reflect the sounds of the Turkish language (which is a Turkic as opposed to Semitic language), which imposed a further difficulty on Turkish children. In turn, the higher educational levels of the Christians allowed them to play a larger role in the economy, with the rise in prominence of groups such as the Sursock family indicative of this shift in influence. In 1911, of the 654 wholesale companies in Istanbul, 528 were owned by ethnic Greeks. In many cases, Christians and also Jews were able to gain protection from European consuls and citizenship, meaning they were protected from Ottoman law and not subject to the same economic regulations as their Muslim comrades.
Turkish literature
The reforms to the literary language were undertaken because the Ottoman Turkish language was thought by the reformists to have effectively lost its way. It had become more divorced than ever from its original basis in Turkish, with writers using more and more words and even grammatical structures derived from Persian and Arabic, rather than Turkish. Meanwhile, however, the Turkish folk literature tradition of Anatolia, away from the capital Constantinople, came to be seen as an ideal. Accordingly, many of the reformists called for written literature to turn away from the Divan tradition and towards the folk tradition; this call for change can be seen, for example, in a famous statement by the poet and reformist Ziya Pasha (1829–1880):
Musa Qazimi
On May 17, 1914, a revolt broke out in the countryside nearby Tirana, led by the charismatic sheikh Haxhi Qamili and a group of other Muslim clerics. The rebels fought under the Ottoman flag and opposed the rule of Prince Weid, who was both a Christian and a foreigner. They opposed the separation of Albania from the Ottoman Empire. The motto of the rebels was "Duam, duam Babën-- Turqinë!" (We want, we want our father—Turkey) and they raised the flag of the Ottoman Empire and restored Ottoman Turkish as the national language.
İbrahim Şinasi
Şinasi's major contributions to reform and to Ottoman and Turkish culture were the result of his use of language. Prior to Şinasi, Namık Kemal, and Ziya Pasha, Ottoman writing was largely split into elite literature and folk literature. The writing of the elites was almost exclusively poetry ("divan şiiri") of a strict form, meter, and rhyme. It was written strictly in the Ottoman Turkish language, which incorporated vocabulary words from Arabic and Persian that were beyond the understanding of the common people (who spoke "vulgar Turkish" ("kaba Türkçe"), which more resembled Modern Turkish); it emphasized artistic excellence over communication. The elites wrote for each other, rather than for the general public. Both elite and folk literature incorporated elements of the Islamic tradition, but popular writing drew heavily on the Central Asian roots of the Ottomans. It employed both verse and prose, but members of the elite did not take it seriously.
Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire
The introduction of the first Ottoman paper banknotes (1840) and opening of the first post offices (1840); the reorganization of the finance system according to the French model (1840); the reorganization of the Civil and Criminal Code according to the French model (1840); the establishment of the "Meclis-i Maarif-i Umumiye" (1841) which was the prototype of the First Ottoman Parliament (1876); the reorganisation of the army and a regular method of recruiting, levying the army and fixing the duration of military service (1843–44); the adoption of an Ottoman national anthem and Ottoman national flag (1844); the institution of a Council of Public Instruction (1845) and the Ministry of Education ("Mekatib-i Umumiye Nezareti", 1847, which later became the "Maarif Nezareti", 1857); the abolition of slavery and slave trade (1847); the establishment of the first modern universities ("darülfünun", 1848), academies (1848) and teacher schools ("darülmuallimin", 1848);
Citizen, speak Turkish!
During the Ottoman Empire in 1911, the Committee of Union and Progress decided to employ the Turkish language in all the schools of the Empire, with the aim to denationalize all the non-Turkish communities and instil patriotism among Turks. The reformation of the state schooling system and of language by the compulsory use of demotic Turkish aimed for the linguistic homogenization of society. The standardization of the Turkish language aimed to sever the link with the Ottoman language and past in order to create a new sense of Turkish nationhood.
Islam in Uttar Pradesh
Later on, during the Mughal Empire, the development of Urdu was further strengthened and started to emerge as a new language. The official language of the Ghurids, Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also from Central Asia, they spoke Turkish as their first language; however the Mughals later adopted Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India before the Mughals entered the scene. Babur's mother tongue was a Turkic language and he wrote exclusively in Turkish. His son and successor Humayun also spoke and wrote in this Turkic language. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, asserts that Persian became the "lingua franca" of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature.
Ottoman Empire
During the 16th and 17th centuries, at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational, multilingual empire controlling most of Southeast Europe, parts of Central Europe, Western Asia, parts of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. At the beginning of the 17th century, the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.
Firman of Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey
Agop Dilaçar, who is known for his works on the Sun Language Theory, claimed that Mehmed Bey might have declared Turkish the official language of the state. According to Dilaçar, in his firman dated 13 May (15 May ?) 1277, he ordered that "from that day forward, in the council, in the dervish lodge, in the court, in the assembly, in the square, no language but Turkish should be spoken".
Before him, the Seljuq elite in Anatolia used Persian in literature and Arabic in government and science. The Turkmen, however, could not understand these languages.
List of lingua francas
In the Middle East, from around 2600BCE to 1500BCE, forms of Akkadian were the universally recognized language. It was used throughout the Akkadian empire as well as internationally as a diplomatic language – for example between Egypt and Babylon – well after the fall of the Akkadian empire itself and even while Aramaic was more common in Babylon.
Croat Muslims
In 1585, a traveler and writer Marco A. Pigaffetta, in his "Itinerario" published in London, states: "In Constantinople it is customary to speak Croatian, a language which is understood by almost all official Turks, especially military men." Crucially though, the lingua franca at the time among Slavic elites in the Ottoman Empire was still Old Church Slavonic. For Italians traveling through to Istanbul, the language of the Slavic Croats was often the only exposure they had to any of the Slavic languages; indeed, Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects were far more common in Istanbul than Croatian.
Ezāfe
Besides Persian, ezafe is found in other Iranian languages as well as in Turkic languages, which have historically borrowed many phrases from Persian. Ottoman Turkish made extensive use of ezafe, borrowing it from Persian (the official name of the Ottoman Empire was "Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniyye"), but it is transcribed as "-i" or "-ı" rather than "-e". Ezafe is also used extensively in Urdu although its use is mostly restricted to poetic settings or to phrases imported wholesale from Persian since Urdu usually expresses the genitive with the Hindustani declined possessive postposition "kā".
Ottoman Empire
The two primary streams of Ottoman written literature are poetry and prose. Poetry was by far the dominant stream. Until the 19th century, Ottoman prose did not contain any examples of fiction: there were no counterparts to, for instance, the European romance, short story, or novel. Analogue genres did exist, though, in both Turkish folk literature and in Divan poetry.
Sami Frashëri
For example, one entry titled "Arnavud" (Albanian) was six pages and a total of eleven columns. The detailed article presented Albanians as an ancient Balkan people, older than Greeks and Latins that preserved in the mountains their customs such as the besa, traditions, language and an identity. The assertion aimed to present Albanians as legitimate members of the community of nations during an era of nationalism. Frashëri included information on the Venetian period, Ottoman conquest, conversion to Islam, attainment of Ottoman privileges and highlighting sacrifice and service to the state as soldiers, bureaucrats, in commerce and industry by Albanians. Skanderbeg, a fifteenth century warrior and his revolt against the Ottomans were described in a positive light as were the national and intellectual achievements of the Albanian diaspora in southern Italy. Despite regional differences of Ghegs and Tosks, Frashëri emphasized the unity of Albanians as speaking the same language with small dialectal differences. He stressed the importance of developing Albanian language education and literature as a way of resisting encroachment from others through for example Hellenisation and as such urged authorities to allow Albanian national development. As with other entries on cities, towns, administrative units and others on Albanian topics Frashëri overall aimed in his encyclopedia to educate the general public about Albanians, to raise Albanian self-awareness and outline the geographical boundaries of Albania. The concept of Albanianism was also subtly developed within his encyclopedia.
In comparison, the article "Türk" was three pages and five columns which underfeatured the importance and role of Turks in the empire when compared to Albanians. Tracing their history Frashëri described the Turks "as among Asia's biggest and most famous nations" numbering ten million and the Ottoman Empire as a "Turkish state". Apart from the prominence of Turks and Turkish culture, Frashëri stressed the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Ottoman Empire in his encyclopedia. That theme was embodied in the entry "Ottoman" a term Frashëri presented as originating from a great Turkish tribe with a change in meaning over time encompassing all Ottoman peoples and subjects, due to the Tanzimat reforms guided by a principle of equality.
Liwa (Arabic)
"Liwa" was used interchangeably with the Turkish term "Sanjak" in the time of the Ottoman Empire. After the fall of the empire, the term was used in the Arab countries formerly under Ottoman rule. It was gradually replaced by other terms like qadaa and mintaqa and is now defunct. It is only used occasionally in Syria to refer to the Hatay Province, ceded by the French mandate of Syria to Turkey in 1939, at which time was known as "Liwa' Iskenderun".
Outline of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire that lasted from c. 1299 to 1922. It was also known by its European contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey after the principal ethnic group. At its zenith from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries it controlled Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, or as a dynastic institution, the House of Osman, was unprecedented and unequaled in the Islamic world for its size and duration. In Europe, only the House of Habsburg had a similarly unbroken line of sovereigns (kings/emperors) from the same family who ruled for so long, and during the same period, between the late 13th and early 20th centuries. The Ottoman dynasty was Turkish in origin. On eleven occasions, the sultan was deposed (replaced by another sultan of the Ottoman dynasty, who were either the former sultan's brother, son or nephew) because he was perceived by his enemies as a threat to the state. There were only two attempts in Ottoman history to unseat the ruling Ottoman dynasty, both failures, which suggests a political system that for an extended period was able to manage its revolutions without unnecessary instability. As such, the last Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI (r. 1918–1922) was a direct patrilineal (male-line) descendant of the first Ottoman sultan Osman I (d. 1323/4), which was unparallelled in both Europe (e.g. the male line of the House of Habsburg became extinct in 1740) and in the Islamic world. The primary purpose of the Imperial Harem was to ensure the birth of male heirs to the Ottoman throne and secure the continuation of the direct patrilineal (male-line) descendance of the Ottoman sultans.
Turkish dialects
The Turkish language was introduced to the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Today, Turkish is still spoken by the Turkish minorities who are still living in the region, especially in Bulgaria, Greece (mainly in Western Thrace), Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia, and Romania. Balkans Ottoman Turkish dialects were first described at the beginning of the 20th century, and are called "Rumelian"—a term introduced by Gyula Németh in 1956. Németh also established the basic division between Eastern Rumelian and Western Rumelian group of dialects. The bundle of isoglosses separating the two groups roughly follows the Bulgarian yat border. The eight basic Western Rumelian Turkish features are:
Additional features have been suggested such as the fronting of /k/ and /g/ to palatal affricates or stops, and the loss of /h/, especially in a word-initial position.
Dragoman of the Porte
In the Ottoman Empire, the existence of official interpreters or dragomans (from the Italian rendering "drog[o]man" of Arabic "tardjumān", Ottoman "terdjümân") is attested from the early 16th century. They were part of the staff of the "reis ül-küttab", who was responsible for foreign affairs within the Imperial Council. As few Ottoman Turks ever learned European languages, from early times the majority of these men were of Christian origin—in the main Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, and Greeks. 
In 1661, the Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü appointed the Greek Panagiotis Nikousios as Chief Dragoman to the Imperial Council. He was in turn succeeded in 1673 by another Greek, Alexander Mavrocordatos. These men began a tradition where almost all subsequent Grand Dragomans of the Porte were of Greek origin or Hellenized as members of a small circle of Phanariote families, such as the Mavrocordatos, Ghica, or Callimachi clans. Many of the Phanariotes had previously served in the staffs of the European embassies in Constantinople. Nikousios, for instance, had previously (and for a time concurrently) served as translator for the Austrian embassy.
Persian language
The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca, a task for which it was particularly suitable due to its relatively simple morphological structure and this situation persisted until at least 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on the Persian model: Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian.
Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Turks (or Osmanlı Turks, ) were the Turkish-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire who formed the base of the state's military and ruling classes. Reliable information about the early history of Ottoman Turks is scarce, but they take their Turkish name, "Osmanlı" ("Osman" being corrupted in some European languages as "Ottoman"), from the house of Osman I (reigned ca. 1299–1326), the founder of the dynasty that ruled the Ottoman Empire for its entire 624 years. After the expansion from its home in Bithynia, the Ottoman principality began incorporating other Turkish-speaking Muslims and non-Turkish Christians, becoming the Ottoman Turks and ultimately the Turks of the present. The Ottoman Turks blocked all land routes to Europe by conquering the city of Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine–East Roman Empire, and Europeans had to find other ways to trade with Eastern countries.
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü
In 1933, Fuat Köprülü became a professor ordinarius, a title denoting a professor of the highest rank in Turkey. In 1935, he delivered a series of influential lectures at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) on the origins of the Ottoman Empire. Fuat Köprülü argued that ethnic Turks formed the Ottoman Empire using Seljuk and Ilhanid administrative traditions, and he discredited the prevailing view among Western scholars that the Ottoman Empire was formed by a race of predominantly Greek and Slavic converts to Islam.
Cretan Turks
At all periods, most Cretan Muslims were Greek-speaking, but the language of administration and the prestige language for the Muslim urban upper classes was Ottoman Turkish. In the folk tradition, however, Greek was used to express Muslims' "Islamic--often Bektashi--sensibility".
History of the Ottoman Empire
Overall, the Tanzimat reforms had far-reaching effects. Those educated in the schools established during the Tanzimat period included Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and other progressive leaders and thinkers of the Republic of Turkey and of many other former Ottoman states in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. These reforms included guarantees to ensure the Ottoman subjects perfect security for their lives, honour and property; the introduction of the first Ottoman paper banknotes (1840) and opening of the first post offices (1840); the reorganisation of the finance system according to the French model (1840); the reorganisation of the Civil and Criminal Code according to the French model (1840); the establishment of the "Meclis-i Maarif-i Umumiye" (1841) which was the prototype of the First Ottoman Parliament (1876); the reorganisation of the army and a regular method of recruiting, levying the army and fixing the duration of military service (1843–44); the adoption of an Ottoman national anthem and Ottoman national flag (1844); the first nationwide Ottoman census in 1844 (only male citizens were counted); the first national identity cards (officially named the "Mecidiye" identity papers, or informally "kafa kağıdı" ("head paper") documents, 1844); the institution of a Council of Public Instruction (1845) and the Ministry of Education ("Mekatib-i Umumiye Nezareti", 1847, which later became the "Maarif Nezareti", 1857); the abolition of slavery and slave trade (1847); the establishment of the first modern universities ("darülfünun", 1848), academies (1848) and teacher schools ("darülmuallimin", 1848); establishment of the Ministry of Healthcare ("Tıbbiye Nezareti", 1850); the Commerce and Trade Code (1850); establishment of the Academy of Sciences ("Encümen-i Daniş", 1851); establishment of the "Şirket-i Hayriye" which operated the first steam-powered commuter ferries (1851); the first European style courts ("Meclis-i Ahkam-ı Adliye", 1853) and supreme judiciary council ("Meclis-i Ali-yi Tanzimat", 1853); establishment of the modern Municipality of Istanbul ("Şehremaneti", 1854) and the City Planning Council ("İntizam-ı Şehir Komisyonu", 1855); the abolition of the capitation (Jizya) tax on non-Muslims, with a regular method of establishing and collecting taxes (1856); non-Muslims were allowed to become soldiers (1856); various provisions for the better administration of the public service and advancement of commerce; the establishment of the first telegraph networks (1847–1855) and railways (1856); the replacement of guilds with factories; the establishment of the Ottoman Central Bank (originally established as the "Bank-ı Osmanî" in 1856, and later reorganised as the "Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane" in 1863) and the Ottoman Stock Exchange ("Dersaadet Tahvilat Borsası", established in 1866); the Land Code ("Arazi Kanunnamesi", 1857); permission for private sector publishers and printing firms with the "Serbesti-i Kürşad Nizamnamesi" (1857); establishment of the School of Economical and Political Sciences ("Mekteb-i Mülkiye", 1859); the Press and Journalism Regulation Code ("Matbuat Nizamnamesi", 1864); among others.
The Ottoman Ministry of Post was established in Istanbul on 23 October 1840. The first post office was the "Postahane-i Amire" near the courtyard of the Yeni Mosque. In 1876 the first international mailing network between Istanbul and the lands beyond the vast Ottoman Empire was established. In 1901 the first money transfers were made through the post offices and the first cargo services became operational.
Replacement of loanwords in Turkish
The replacing of loanwords in Turkish is part of a policy of Turkification dating back to the Ottoman Empire. Contemporary Turkish includes Ottoman Turkish loanwords—mostly of Persian and French, but also Arabic, Greek, and Italian origin—which were officially replaced with their Turkish counterparts suggested by the Turkish Language Association (, TDK) as a part of the cultural reforms—in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms—following the foundation of Republic of Turkey.
Turkish vocabulary
When the Ottoman Empire arose out of the remains of the Selcuk Empire in Anatolia, its official language, "Osmanlıca" or Ottoman Turkish, became the only language to approach English in the size of its vocabulary (according to #Lewis). However, common people continued to use "kaba Türkçe" or "rough Turkish" which contained much fewer loanwords and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.
Ottoman Empire
These court categories were not, however, wholly exclusive: for instance, the Islamic courts, which were the Empire's primary courts, could also be used to settle a trade conflict or disputes between litigants of differing religions, and Jews and Christians often went to them to obtain a more forceful ruling on an issue. The Ottoman state tended not to interfere with non-Muslim religious law systems, despite legally having a voice to do so through local governors. The Islamic "Sharia" law system had been developed from a combination of the Qur'an; the Hadīth, or words of the prophet Muhammad; "ijmā'", or consensus of the members of the Muslim community; qiyas, a system of analogical reasoning from earlier precedents; and local customs. Both systems were taught at the Empire's law schools, which were in Istanbul and Bursa.
Mosul
Despite being a part of the Ottoman Empire, during the four centuries of Ottoman rule Mosul was considered "the most independent district" within the Middle East, following the Roman model of indirect rule through local notables. "Mosuli culture developed less along Ottoman–Turkish lines than along Iraqi–Arab lines; and Turkish, the official language of the State, was certainly not the dominant language in the province."
List of lingua francas
Aramaic was the native language of the Aramaeans and became the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire and the western provinces of the Persian Empire, and was adopted by conquered peoples such as the Hebrews. A dialect of Old Aramaic developed into the literary language Syriac. The Syriacs, such as the Syriac-Aramaean, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, continued the use of Aramaic which ultimately evolved into the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Middle East.
List of lingua francas
Prior to European colonization, the Occaneechi dialect of the Tutelo language served as a lingua franca in the land that would become the state of Virginia. Tutelo was a Siouan language. But Robert Beverley, Jr. observed that the Tuscarora, who spoke an Iroquoian language, and the Powhatan, who spoke an Algonquian language, both used Occaneechi in religious ceremonies, much like modern Christian communities use Latin. Beverley also noted that the Occaneechi language was used by all native nations of Virginia as a trade language.
List of lingua francas
When the United Kingdom became a colonial power, English served as the lingua franca of the colonies of the British Empire. In the post-colonial period, some of the newly created nations which had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as an official language to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. The British Empire established the use of English in regions around the world such as North America, India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, so that by the late 19th century its reach was truly global, and in the latter half of the 20th century, widespread international use of English was much reinforced by the global economic, financial, scientific, military, and cultural pre-eminence of the English-speaking countries and especially the U.S. Today, more than half of all scientific journals are published in English, while in France, almost one-third of all natural science research appears in English, lending support to English being the lingua franca of science and technology. English is also the lingua franca of international air traffic control and seafaring communications.
Ioannina
Despite the repression and conversions in the 17th century, and the prominence of the Muslim population in the city's affairs, Ioannina retained its Christian majority throughout Ottoman rule, and the Greek language retained a dominant position; Turkish was spoken by the Ottoman officials and the garrison, and the Albanian inhabitants used Albanian, but the "lingua franca" and native language of most inhabitants was Greek, including among the "Tourkoyanniotes", and was sometimes used by the Ottoman authorities themselves.
Turkish language
Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters and a great quantity of imported words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (c. 1299–1922) is termed Ottoman Turkish, which was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably and was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as "kaba Türkçe" or "rough Turkish", spoken by the less-educated lower and also rural members of society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as basis for the modern Turkish language.
Dragoman
The position took particular prominence in the Ottoman Empire, where demand for the mediation provided by dragomans is said to have been created by the resistance on the part of the Muslim Ottomans to learn the languages of non-Muslim nations. The office incorporated diplomatic as well as linguistic duties—namely, in the Porte's relation with Christian countries—and some dragomans thus came to play crucial roles in Ottoman politics. The profession tended to be dominated by ethnic Greeks, including the first Ottoman Dragoman of the Sublime Porte, Panagiotis Nikousios, the official interpreter for the "Divan" (Imperial Council) of the Sultan, and his successor Alexander Mavrocordatos. But this dominance changed in 1821 with the start of the Greek War of Independence. In 1821 the chief dragoman Constantine Mourouzi was executed for suspected disloyalty, and his successor, Stavraki Aristarchi, was dismissed and exiled in 1822. With unanswered correspondence accumulating, the chief naval instructor, one Ishak Efendi, took over the position and became a pioneer in translation of Western scientific literature into Turkish, a task for which he had to create an entirely new vocabulary. Following Ishak, the grand dragoman and his staff were Muslims, and the Translation Office ("Tercüme Odası", "Translation Room", in Turkish), with its familiarity with things European, became a new major ladder to influence and power in the Tanzimat era; this knowledge largely replaced the older ladders of the army, the bureaucracy, and the religious establishment in the mid- and late-19th century.
Young Ottomans
One of their greatest legacies of the Young Ottomans in the Ottoman Empire was in their actions, as they were "regarded as the first modern ideological movement among the Ottoman elite of the empire, and they were the first who, through their writings, consciously tried to create and influence public opinion." The use of the press as a tool of political criticism is also attributed to the innovation of the Young Ottomans. Additionally, by assigning new meanings to liberal terminology, with terms such as "vatan" ("motherland") and "hürriyet" ("liberty"), leading Young Ottomans such as Namık Kemal lent the powerful expression of ideologies to later nationalist and liberal groups within the Ottoman Empire.
Lala (title)
The practice of lala was even older than the Ottoman Empire. During the Seljuk Empire, the experienced statesmen accompanying the princes were called Atabeg or Atabey ( a Turkish composite title meaning ancestor-lord). However, Seljuk Empire was highly feudalistic and atabeys frequently used their power for separatist policies whenever they felt a weakness in the central authority. (like Eldiguzids in Azerbaijan and Zengids) 
The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand was more centralist and almost no lala tried to follow a separatist policy.
Haxhi Qamili
The motto of the rebels was "Duam, duam Babën-- Turqinë!" (We want, we want our father -- Turkey) and they raised the flag of the Ottoman Empire and restored Ottoman Turkish as the national language.
Ottoman Turkish language
Most Ottoman Turkish was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet ("elifbâ" ), a variant of the Perso-Arabic script. The Armenian, Greek and Rashi script of Hebrew were sometimes used by Armenians, Greeks and Jews.
Loanword
During more than 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and administrative language of the empire was Turkish, with many Persian, and Arabic loanwords, called Ottoman Turkish, considerably differing from the everyday spoken Turkish of the time. Many such words were exported to other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Ladino, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. After the empire fell after World War I and the Republic of Turkey was founded, the Turkish language underwent an extensive language reform led by the newly founded Turkish Language Association, during which many adopted words were replaced with new formations derived from Turkic roots. That was part of the ongoing cultural reform of the time, in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms, which also included the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans absorbed some of the traditions, art and institutions of cultures in the regions they conquered, and added new dimensions to them. Numerous traditions and cultural traits of previous empires (in fields such as architecture, cuisine, music, leisure and government) were adopted by the Ottoman Turks, who elaborated them into new forms, resulting in a new and distinctively Ottoman cultural identity. Despite newer added amalgamations, the Ottoman dynasty, like their predecessors in the Sultanate of Rum and the Seljuk Empire, were thoroughly Persianised in their culture, language, habits and customs, and therefore the empire has been described as a Persianate empire. Intercultural marriages also played a part in creating the characteristic Ottoman elite culture. When compared to the Turkish folk culture, the influence of these new cultures in creating the culture of the Ottoman elite was clear.
Francophile
The French Revolution and its ideals of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" inspired many secular and progressive movements in Ottoman Turkey, including the Young Turk movement that would go on to create the Republic of Turkey. Napoleon's breaking of the age-old Franco-Ottoman alliance by conquering Ottoman-controlled Egypt also had an effect. Muhammad Ali the Great, who became the Ottoman "vali" (governor) of Egypt in 1805 and ruled as a "de facto" independent ruler until his death in 1848 had been strongly impressed with the Napoleon's "Armée d'Orient", and imported French veterans of the Napoleonic wars to train his army. Egypt was very much in the French sphere of influence politically, economically and culturally in the 19th century, and French was the preferred language of Egypt's elites right up to the 1952 revolution. At the court of the Khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt, better known as Isma'il the Magnificent the languages used were French and Turkish. Reflecting his Francophilia, the French-educated Isma'il emulated Baron Haussmann by tearing down much of Cairo to rebuild it in the style of Paris. Even today, the architecture of Downtown Cairo closely resembles that of downtown Paris.
Turkish Cypriots
The Turkish language was introduced to Cyprus with the Ottoman conquest in 1571 and became the politically dominant, prestigious language, of the administration. In the post-Ottoman period, Cypriot Turkish was relatively isolated from standard Turkish and had strong influences by the Cypriot Greek dialect. The condition of coexistence with the Greek Cypriots led to a certain bilingualism whereby Turkish Cypriots' knowledge of Greek was important in areas where the two communities lived and worked together.
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Since the founding of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans followed the Maturidi creed (school of Islamic theology) and the Hanafi madhab (school of Islamic jurisprudence). However, it was the Ash'ari creed that was more prevalent in the madrassahs (Islamic schools). Both the Maturidi and Ash'ari schools of Islamic theology used Ilm al-Kalam (reason) to understand the Quran and the hadith (sayings and actions of Mohammed and the Rashidun) so as to apply Islamic principles to fatwas (Islamic rulings). This is in contrast to the Athari (or literal) school of Islamic theology which takes the Quran and the hadith literally.
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü
From 1910 to 1913, Fuat Köprülü taught Turkish language and literature at various high schools in Istanbul, including the prestigious Galatasaray High School. Fuat Köprülü initially opposed the literary movement known as New Language, which sought to simplify the Turkish language, and wrote articles for the "Servet-i Funun" magazine using a literary style comprehensible only to the most learned of Ottoman intellectuals. Fuat Köprülü changed his writing style and politics during the Balkan Wars. On February 6, 1913, the day after the Bulgarian army attacked the Ottoman lines in the outskirts of Istanbul, "Turk Yurdu" magazine, a bastion of simplified Turkish prose and Turkish nationalism, published the first of many popular and patriotic essays by the 23-year-old Fuat Köprülü: “Umit ve Azim” (Hope and Determination), “Hicret Matemleri” (Mourning Migration), “Turk’un Duasi” (A Turk's Prayer), and “Turkluk, Islamlik, Osmanlilik” (Turkishness, Islamness, Ottomanness).
ISO 639-6
The database differentiates between different scripts used for the same language. For example, a number of different scripts were used in the Ottoman Empire and as a result the Ottoman Turkish language has been categorized as follows:
Francophile
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, French and British colonial influence increased in Anatolia and the Middle East, and the French language and customs penetrated deep into the Ottoman learned classes and aristocracy; French was the preferred second language, rich Ottomans sent their children to school and Universities in France and the Western "Enlightenment" was associated with French culture Modern Turkish continues to have many French loanwords that were adopted in this period, and 5,350 Turkish words are of French origin, according to the Turkish Language Society, one eighth of a standard dictionary. List of replaced loanwords in Turkish#Loanwords of French origin Francophilia still exists to a rather limited extent in modern Turkey. Vestiges of the 19th and early 20th century Francophilia include the famous Pera Palace hotel in Istanbul.
World language
The Romance languages bear testimony to the role of Latin as the "lingua franca" of the Roman Empire; for example, Italian has always been important in the Mediterranean region, and nowadays it is the most-spoken language among members of the Roman catholic hierarchy and it is also used in music (especially Opera) and the fashion industry. Turkish was similarly important as the primary language of the Ottoman Empire. Koine Greek was the "world language" of the Hellenistic period, but its distribution is not reflected in the distribution of Modern Greek due to the linguistic impact of the Slavic, Arabic and Turkic expansions. The distribution of the Arabic and Turkic languages, in turn, are a legacy of the Caliphates and the Turkic Khaganate, respectively.
Persian literature
Despite that Asia Minor (or Anatolia) had been ruled various times prior to the Middle Ages by various Persian-speaking dynasties originating in Iran, the language lost its traditional foothold there with the demise of the Sassanian Empire. Centuries later however, the practise and usage in the region would be strongly revived. A branch of the Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum, took Persian language, art and letters to Anatolia. They adopted Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans, which can "roughly" be seen as their eventual successors, took this tradition over. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of the Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as sultan Selim I, despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam. It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian literature works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi's "Hasht Bihisht", which begun in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the "Salim-Namah", a glorification of Selim I. After a period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed towards a fully accepted language of literature, which was even able to satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. The Ottomans produced thousands of Persian literary works throughout their century long lifespan.
Ottoman Empire
The Turkish word for "Ottoman" ("Osmanlı") originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the fourteenth century, and subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term "Turk" ("Türk") was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population, and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated individuals. In the early modern period, an educated urban-dwelling Turkish-speaker who was not a member of the military-administrative class would refer to himself neither as an "Osmanlı" nor as a "Türk", but rather as a "Rūmī" (), or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term "Rūmī" was also used to refer to Turkish-speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond.
Prose of the Ottoman Empire
Nevertheless, there was a long tradition of prose in the Ottoman Empire. This tradition was, for centuries, exclusively nonfictional in nature—the fiction tradition was limited to narrative poetry. A number of such nonfictional prose genres developed:
Culture of the Ottoman Empire
Prior to the 19th century, Ottoman prose was exclusively non-fictional, and was much less highly developed than Ottoman poetry, in part because much of it followed the rules of the originally Arabic tradition of rhymed prose (Saj'). Nevertheless, a number of genres - the travelogue, the political treatise and biography - were current.
Franco-Ottoman alliance
An embassy was again sent to Louis XIII in 1607, and from Mehmed IV to Louis XIV in 1669 in the person of ambassador Müteferrika Süleyman Ağa, who created a sensation at the French court and even triggered a Turkish fashion. The Orient came to have a strong influence in French literature, as about 50% of French travel guides in the 16th century were dedicated to the Ottoman Empire.
Chiflik
Chiflik, or chiftlik (Ottoman Turkish: ; ; , "chiflik"; , "čiflig"; ; /"čitluk"), is a Turkish term for a system of land management in the Ottoman Empire. Before the chiflik system the Empire used a non-hereditary form of land management called the Timar System. Starting as the Empire began to collapse, powerful military officers started to claim land from the Sultan's holding allowing them to pass the land onto their sons thus creating the Chiflik system. This form of land management lasted from the sixteenth century to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919.
Ottoman Turkish language
Ottoman Turkish (; ), or the Ottoman language (Ottoman Turkish: , , also known as , or , , "Turkish"; ), is the variety of the Turkish language that was used in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows, in all aspects, extensively from Arabic and Persian, and it was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. During the peak of Ottoman power, Persian and Arabic vocabulary accounted for up to 88% of the Ottoman vocabulary, while words of foreign origin heavily outnumbered native Turkish words.
Timurid Empire
During the Timurid era, Central Asian society was bifurcated, with the responsibilities of government and rule divided into military and civilian spheres along ethnic lines. At least in the early stages, the military was almost exclusively Turko-Mongolian, while the civilian and administrative element was almost exclusively Persian. The spoken language shared by all the Turko-Mongolians throughout the area was Chaghatay. The political organization hearkened back to the steppe-nomadic system of patronage introduced by Genghis Khan. The major language of the period, however, was Persian, the native language of the Tājīk (Persian) component of society and the language of learning acquired by all literate and/or urban people. Timur was already steeped in Persian culture and in most of the territories he incorporated, Persian was the primary language of administration and literary culture. Thus the language of the settled "diwan" was Persian, and its scribes had to be thoroughly adept in Persian culture, whatever their ethnic origin. Persian became the official state language of the Timurid Empire and served as the language of administration, history, belles lettres, and poetry. The Chaghatay language was the native and "home language" of the Timurid family, while Arabic served as the language "par excellence" of science, philosophy, theology and the religious sciences.
Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Empire came to rule much of the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East (excluding Iran), and North Africa over the course of several centuries, with an advanced army and navy. The Empire lasted until the end of the First World War, when it was defeated by the Allies and partitioned. Following the successful Turkish War of Independence that ended with the Turkish national movement retaking most of the land lost to the Allies, the movement abolished the Ottoman sultanate on November 1, 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923. The movement nullified the Treaty of Sèvres and negotiated the enormously more favorable Treaty of Lausanne (1923), assuring recognition of modern Turkish national borders, termed "Misak-ı Milli" (National Pact).
Sanjak
Sanjaks (; ; Modern Turkish: "Sancak", ) were administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire. "Sanjak," and the variant spellings "sandjak, sanjaq," and "sinjaq," are English transliterations of the Turkish word "sancak," meaning "district," "banner," or "flag". Sanjaks were also called by the Arabic word for banner or flag: "liwa".
Ottoman Turkish language
Historically, Ottoman Turkish was transformed in three eras:In 1928, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, widespread language reforms (a part in the greater framework of Atatürk's Reforms) instituted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw the replacement of many Persian and Arabic origin loanwords in the language with their Turkish equivalents. It also saw the replacement of the Perso-Arabic script with the extended Latin alphabet. The changes were meant to encourage the growth of a new variety of written Turkish that more closely reflected the spoken vernacular and to foster a new variety of spoken Turkish that reinforced Turkey's new national identity as being a post-Ottoman state.
Ottoman Turkish language
The transliteration system of the İslâm Ansiklopedisi has become a "de facto" standard in Oriental studies for the transliteration of Ottoman Turkish texts. Concerning transcription the New Redhouse, Karl Steuerwald and Ferit Develioğlu dictionaries have become standard. Another transliteration system is the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG), which provides a transliteration system for any Turkic language written in Arabic script. There are not many differences between the İA and the DMG transliteration systems.
Galatasaray High School
Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876) was the first Ottoman sultan to travel to Europe. Invited by Napoleon III, in June–July 1867 he attended the World Exhibition in Paris. He then visited Queen Victoria in London, Wilhelm I in Prussia and Franz Joseph I in Vienna. Sultan Abdülaziz was impressed by the French educational system during his visit, and on his return to Istanbul he announced the Edict of Public Education which established a free compulsory education system for all children until they became twelve. In September 1868, influenced by the French "Lycée" model, a school was established under the name ""Lycée Impérial Ottoman de Galata-Sérai"" ("Galatasaray Mekteb-i Sultanisi"). French was the main language of instruction, and many teachers were European. The students included members of all religious and ethnic communities of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman Empire
The organization of the treasury and chancery were developed under the Ottoman Empire more than any other Islamic government and, until the 17th century, they were the leading organization among all their contemporaries. This organization developed a scribal bureaucracy (known as "men of the pen") as a distinct group, partly highly trained ulama, which developed into a professional body. The effectiveness of this professional financial body stands behind the success of many great Ottoman statesmen.
Turkish language
With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries), peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia, covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia and to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language—into Anatolia during the 11th century. Also during the 11th century, an early linguist of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers in the "Compendium of the Turkic Dialects" (Ottoman Turkish: "Divânü Lügati't-Türk").
Rise of the Ottoman Empire
When the Ottoman polity first emerged at the end of the thirteenth century under the leadership of Osman I, it had a tribal organization without a complex administrative apparatus. As Ottoman territory expanded its rulers were faced with the challenge of administering an ever-larger population. Early on the Ottomans adopted the Seljuks of Rum as models, and by 1324 were able to produce Persian-language bureaucratic documents in the Seljuk style.
Turkish vocabulary
With the advent of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came the attempt to unify the languages of the people and the administration, and to westernize the country. The modern Turkish alphabet, based on the Latin script, was introduced. Also, Arabic and Persian words were replaced, as possible, by:
Turkish words surviving in speech, obsolete Turkish words, new words formed regularly from the agglutinative resources of Turkish, thoroughly new words or formations. However, still a large portion of current Turkish words have Arabic or Persian origins.
Turkish has words borrowed from Greek due to the Ottoman Empire having conquered the Byzantine Empire. There are also borrowings from other European languages, or from the common technical vocabulary of Europe.
In the latter case, the borrowings are usually taken in their French pronunciation.
Ottoman law
The Ottoman Empire was governed by different sets of laws during its existence. The "Kanun" a secular legal system, co-existed with religious law or Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. Legal administration in the Ottoman Empire was part of a larger scheme of balancing central and local authority. Ottoman power revolved crucially around the administration of the rights to land, which gave a space for the local authority develop the needs of the local millet. The jurisdictional complexity of the Ottoman Empire was aimed to permit the integration of culturally and religiously different groups.
Languages of the Ottoman Empire
In 1827 Sultan Mahmud II announced that the empire's first medical school, for the military, would for the time being teach in French; that school and a civil medical school both taught in French. By the 1860s advocates of French medium instruction and Ottoman Turkish medium instruction were engaged in a conflict; Turks advocated for Turkish while minoritarian groups and foreigners advocated for French. The empire later made Ottoman Turkish the language of the two medical schools.
Secularism in Turkey
The establishing structure (Ruling institution of the Ottoman Empire) of the Ottoman Empire (13th century) was an Islamic state in which the head of the Ottoman state was the Sultan. The social system was organized around millet. Millet structure allowed a great degree of religious, cultural and ethnic continuity to non-Muslim populations across the subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire and at the same time it permitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and political system. The Ottoman-appointed governor collected taxes and provided security, while the local religious or cultural matters were left to the regional communities to decide. On the other hand, the sultans were Muslims and the laws that bound them were based on the Sharia, the body of Islamic law, as well as various cultural customs. The Sultan, beginning in 1517, was also a Caliph, the leader of all the Sunni Muslims in the world. By the turn of the 19th century the Ottoman ruling elite recognized the need to restructure the legislative, military and judiciary systems to cope with their new political rivals in Europe. When the millet system started to lose its efficiency due to the rise of nationalism within its borders, the Ottoman Empire explored new ways of governing its territory composed of diverse populations.
Armenian alphabet
For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Persian language
Despite Anatolia having been ruled at various times prior to the Middle Ages by various Persian-speaking dynasties originating in Iran, the language lost its traditional foothold there with the demise of the Sasanian Empire. Centuries later however, the practise and usage of Persian in the region would be strongly revived. A branch of the Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum, took Persian language, art and letters to Anatolia. They adopted Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans, which can roughly be seen as their eventual successors, took this tradition over. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of the Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as sultan Selim I, despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam. It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi's "Hasht Bihisht", which begun in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the "Salim-Namah", a glorification of Selim I. After a period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed towards a fully accepted language of literature, which was even able to satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%.
Economic history of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans saw military expansion and careful use of currency as the main source of wealth, with agriculture seen as more important than manufacture and commerce.[1] Western merchants gave more emphasis to manufacture and industry in the wealth-power-wealth equation, moving towards capitalist economics comprising expanding industries and markets whereas the Ottomans continued along the trajectory of territorial expansion, traditional monopolies, conservative land holding and agriculture.
Culture of Turkey
The two primary streams of Ottoman literature were poetry and prose. Of the two, the Ottoman Divan poetry, a highly ritualized and symbolic art form, was the dominant stream. The vast majority of Divan poetry was lyric in nature: either ghazals or qasidas. There were, however, other common genres, most particularly the mathnawi (also known as "mesnevî"), a kind of verse romance and thus a variety of narrative poetry. The tradition of Ottoman prose was exclusively non-fictional in nature; as the fiction tradition was limited to narrative poetry.
Ottoman poetry
Even in modern Turkey, however, Ottoman Divan poetry is a highly specialist subject. Much of this has to do with the fact that Divan poetry is written in Ottoman Turkish, which was written using a variant of the Arabic script and made extensive use of Arabic and Persian words, making the language vastly different from modern Turkish. In its own time, knowledge of this form of literary Turkish was largely limited to the educated classes.
Turkish literature
The two primary streams of Ottoman written literature are poetry and prose. Of the two, poetry—specifically, Divan poetry—was by far the dominant stream. Moreover, it should be noted that, until the 19th century, Ottoman prose did not contain any examples of fiction; that is, there were no counterparts to, for instance, the European romance, short story, or novel (though analogous genres did, to some extent, exist in both the Turkish folk tradition and in Divan poetry).
List of lingua francas
During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the lingua francas were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was the universal language of prayer and worship. During the Second Vatican Council, Catholic liturgy changed to local languages, although Latin remains the official language of the Vatican. Latin was used as the language of scholars in Europe until the early 19th century in most subjects. For instance, Christopher Simpson's "Chelys or The Division viol" on how to improvise on the viol (viola da gamba) was published in 1665 in a multilingual edition in Latin and English, to make the material accessible for the wider European music community. Another example is the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, who published his book "Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum" in 1741 about an ideal society "Potu" ("Utop" backwards) with equality between the genders and an egalitarian structure, in Latin in Germany to avoid Danish censorship and to reach a greater audience. Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin in 1687: the first English translation did not appear until 1729. In subjects like medicine and theology Latin has been a subject of study until the present day in most European universities, despite declining use in recent years.
History of liberalism
Namik Kemal, who was influential in the formation of the Young Ottomans, admired the constitution of the French Third Republic; he summed up the Young Ottomans' political ideals as "the sovereignty of the nation, the separation of powers, the responsibility of officials, personal freedom, equality, freedom of thought, freedom of press, freedom of association, enjoyment of property, sanctity of the home". The Young Ottomans believed that one of the principal reasons for the decline of the empire was abandoning Islamic principles in favor of imitating European modernity with unadvised compromises to both, and they sought to unite the two in a way that they believed would best serve the interests of the state and its people. They sought to revitalize the empire by incorporating certain Europeans models of government, while still retaining the Islamic foundations the empire was founded on. Among the prominent members of this society were writers and publicists such as İbrahim Şinasi, Namık Kemal, Ali Suavi, Ziya Pasha, and Agah Efendi.
The emerging internal financial and diplomatic crises of 1875–1876 allowed the Young Ottomans their defining moment, when Sultan Abdülhamid II appointed liberal-minded Midhat Pasha as Grand Vizier and reluctantly promulgated the Ottoman constitution of 1876, the first attempt at a constitution in the Ottoman Empire, ushering in the First Constitutional Era and ending the Tanzimat. Thanks to liberal intellectuals who tried to modernize their society by promoting development, progress, and liberal values, constitutionalism was introduced in the Ottoman Empire, Midhat Pasha is often considered to be one of the founders of the Ottoman Parliament. Although this period was short lived, with Abdülhamid ultimately suspending the constitution and parliament in 1878 in favor of a return to absolute monarchy with himself in power, the legacy and influence of the Young Ottomans continued to endure until the collapse of the empire. Several decades later, another group of reform-minded Ottomans, the Young Turks, repeated the Young Ottomans' efforts, leading to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the beginning of the Second Constitutional Era.
Persianate society
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of the "Süleymanname" (or "Suleyman-nama"), a biography of Süleyman the Magnificent. At the end of the 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entire divan in Persian language. According to Hodgson:
Folklore studies
Folklore interest sparked in Turkey around the second half of the nineteenth century when the need to determine a national language came about. Their writings consisted of vocabulary and grammatical rule from the Arabic and Persian language. Although the Ottoman intellectuals were not affected by the communication gap, in 1839, the Tanzimat reform introduced a change to Ottoman literature. A new generation of writers with contact to the West, especially France, noticed the importance of literature and its role in the development of institutions. Following the models set by Westerners, the new generation of writers returned to Turkey bringing the ideologies of novels, short stories, plays and journalism with them. These new forms of literature were set to enlighten the people of Turkey, influencing political and social change within the country. However, the lack of understanding for the language of their writings limited their success in enacting change.
Ottoman Turkish language
Historically speaking, Ottoman Turkish is the predecessor of modern Turkish. However, the standard Turkish of today is essentially "Türkiye Türkçesi" (Turkish of Turkey) as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added, which means there are now far fewer loan words from other languages, and Ottoman Turkish was not instantly transformed into the Turkish of today. At first, it was only the script that was changed, and while some households continued to use the Arabic system in private, most of the Turkish population was illiterate at the time, making the switch to the Latin alphabet much easier. Then, loan words were taken out, and new words fitting the growing amount of technology were introduced. Until the 1960s, Ottoman Turkish was at least partially intelligible with the Turkish of that day. One major difference between modern Turkish and Ottoman Turkish is the former's abandonment of compound word formation according to Arabic and Persian grammar rules. The usage of such phrases still exists in modern Turkish but only to a very limited extent and usually in specialist contexts; for example, the Persian genitive construction "takdîr-i ilâhî" (which reads literally as "the preordaining of the divine" and translates as "divine dispensation" or "destiny") is used, as opposed to the normative modern Turkish construction, "ilâhî takdîr" (literally, "divine preordaining").
Beklan Empire
The "lingua franca" of the empire is the Beklan language.
List of lingua francas
Persian became the second lingua franca of the Islamic world, in particular of the eastern regions. Besides serving as the state and administrative language in many Islamic dynasties, some of which included Samanids, Ghurids, Ghaznavids, Ilkhanids, Seljuqids, Mughals and early Ottomans, Persian cultural and political forms, and often the Persian language, were used by the cultural elites from the Balkans to India. For example, Persian was the only oriental language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. Arnold Joseph Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail:
In the Iranic world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art ... gained a currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia.
Persian remains the lingua franca in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Demographics of Turkey
The word "Türk" was used only referring to Anatolian villagers back in the 19th century. The Ottoman elite identified themselves as Ottomans, not usually as Turks. In the late 19th century, as European ideas of nationalism were adopted by the Ottoman elite, and as it became clear that the Turkish-speakers of Anatolia were the most loyal supporters of Ottoman rule, the term "Türk" took on a much more positive connotation. During Ottoman times, the millet system defined communities on a religious basis, and a residue of this remains in that Turkish villagers will commonly consider as Turks only those who profess the Sunni faith, and will consider Turkish-speaking Jews, Christians, or even Alevis to be non-Turks. On the other hand, Kurdish-speaking or Arabic-speaking Sunnis of eastern Anatolia are sometimes considered to be Turks. The imprecision of the appellation "Türk" can also be seen with other ethnic names, such as "Kürt"(Kurd), which is often applied by western Anatolians to anyone east of Adana, even those who speak only Turkish. Thus, the category "Türk", like other ethnic categories popularly used in Turkey, does not have a uniform usage. In recent years, centrist Turkish politicians have attempted to redefine this category in a more multi-cultural way, emphasizing that a "Türk" is anyone who is a citizen of the Republic of Turkey. Currently, article 66 of the Turkish Constitution defines a ""Turk"" as anyone who is "bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship".
Linguistic imperialism
Anatolia was similarly diverse linguistically when it was ruled by small native states. Under the Persian and Hellenistic empires, the language of the conqueror served as the "lingua franca". The indigenous Anatolian languages disappeared.
Dibër County
In the 19th century, the Congress of Dibër declared the Albanian language as an official language within the Ottoman Empire. After the Balkan Wars and following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the great powers established the borders of the Balkan states at the Conference of London. The Dibër Valley was cut in half. The western part was assigned to Albania, while the eastern part went to the Kingdom of Serbia, today the Republic of Macedonia.
Armenians in Turkey
The Armenian alphabet was also used alongside the Arabic alphabet on official documents of the Ottoman Empire, written in Ottoman Turkish. For example, the Aleppo edition of the official gazette of the Ottoman Empire, called "Frat" (Turkish and Arabic for the Euphrates) contained a Turkish section of laws printed in Armenian alphabet.
History of the Ottoman Empire
This long period of Ottoman peace and, indeed, stagnation is typically characterized by historians as an era of failed reforms. In the latter part of this period there were educational and technological reforms, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University. Ottoman science and technology had been highly regarded in medieval times, as a result of Ottoman scholars' synthesis of classical learning with Islamic philosophy and mathematics, and knowledge of such Chinese advances in technology as gunpowder and the magnetic compass. By this period, though, the influences had become regressive and conservative. In 1734, when an artillery school was established with French teachers in order to impart Western-style artillery methods, the Islamic clergy successfully objected under the grounds of theodicy. Not until 1754 was the artillery school reopened on a semi-secret basis. Earlier, the guilds of writers had denounced the printing press as "the Devil's Invention", and were responsible for a 53-year lag between its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in Europe in c. 1440 and its introduction to the Ottoman society with the first Gutenberg press in Istanbul that was established by the Sephardic Jews of Spain in 1493 (who had migrated to the Ottoman Empire a year earlier, escaping from the Spanish Inquisition of 1492.) However, the printing press was used only by the non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire until the 18th century. In 1726, Ibrahim Muteferrika convinced the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha, the Grand Mufti, and the clergy on the efficiency of the printing press, and later submitted a request to Sultan Ahmed III, who granted Muteferrika the permission to publish non-religious books (despite opposition from some calligraphers and religious leaders.) Muteferrika's press published its first book in 1729, and, by 1743, issued 17 works in 23 volumes (each having between 500 and 1,000 copies.)
Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
Europe became dominated by nation states with the rise of nationalism in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was a religious empire. The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire which resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece in 1821, Serbia in 1835, and Bulgaria in 1877-8. Many of the local Muslims in these countries died during the conflicts and massacres while others fled. Unlike the European nations, the Ottoman Empire made no attempt to integrate conquered peoples through cultural assimilation. The Porte had no official policy of converting the non-Muslims of the Balkans or Anatolia into Islam. Instead, Ottoman policy was to rule through the millet system, constituting of confessional communities for each religion..
World language
Historical languages which had international significance as the "lingua franca" of a historical empire include Egyptian in Ancient Egypt; Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic in the various Mesopotamian civilizations and empires in the Ancient Near East; Ancient Greek in the Greek colonies in the form of various dialects, evolving to Koine Greek in the Hellenistic world, after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire, and subsequently in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and the territories of the Byzantine Empire; Latin in the Roman Empire and presently as the standard liturgical language for the Catholic faithful worldwide; Classical Chinese in East Asia during the Imperial era of Chinese history; Persian during the various succeeding Persian Empires, and once served as the second lingua franca of the Islamic World after Arabic; Sanskrit during the ancient and medieval historical periods of various states in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, and like Latin an important liturgical language of the Vedic religions.
Turkish people
One important change to Turkish literature was enacted in 1928, when Mustafa Kemal initiated the creation and dissemination of a modified version of the Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic alphabet based Ottoman script. Over time, this change, together with changes in Turkey's system of education, would lead to more widespread literacy in the country. Modern standard Turkish is based on the dialect of Istanbul. Nonetheless, dialectal variation persists, in spite of the levelling influence of the standard used in mass media and the Turkish education system since the 1930s. The terms "ağız" or "şive" often refer to the different types of Turkish dialects.
Ottoman Turkish language
Consequently, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and rural Turks, who continued to use "kaba Türkçe" ("raw/vulgar Turkish", as in Vulgar Latin), which used far fewer foreign loanwords and is the basis of the modern Turkish language. The Tanzimât era saw the application of the term "Ottoman" when referring to the language ( or ) and the same distinction is made in Modern Turkish ( and ).The conjugation for the aorist tense is as follows:
Sami Frashëri
The choice of wording by Frashëri in labeling the language Turkish as opposed to Ottoman assisted to nurture a national identity among Turkish people. For him his idea of the Ottoman Empire was for Abdul Hamid II to emphasize Ottomanism over Islamism and incorporate concepts like Turkism and Albanianism into the state framework allowing cultural pluralism with Albanians and Turks each developing their own languages and teaching them in schools. He considered cultural and ethnic diversity of the Muslim community as factors that would strengthen Ottoman unity. Frashëri, after several years of work published a 500-page Arabic dictionary (Kamus-i Arabi) in 1896 and he also noted that Kurdish lacked a dictionary but was unable to compile it as he lacked linguistic skills in the language. Stories of him working on an Albanian dictionary existed during his lifetime. He failed however to produce one and George Gawrych holds that probably due to the work of his friend Konstantin Kristoforidhi whose Albanian dictionary was published in 1904 he choose to let it be the standard version.
Al-Muntada al-Adabi
The 1908 Committee of Union and Progress, "Young Turk", revolution promised to implement political reforms and the establishment of a constitutional government across the Ottoman Empire. The revolution was greeted with approval across the Arab world amongst those who hoped for more recognition of the Arabic language and Arabic culture. In practice the new regime sought to increase central control from Constantinople and to impose Ottoman Turkish as the language of government across the empire.
Ottoman Empire
This eclectic administration was apparent even in the diplomatic correspondence of the Empire, which was initially undertaken in the Greek language to the west.
Jalili dynasty
Despite being a part of the Ottoman Empire, during the four centuries of Ottoman rule Mosul was considered "the most independent district" within the Middle East, following the Roman model of indirect rule through local notables. "Mosuli culture developed less along Ottoman-Turkish lines than along Iraqi-Arab lines; and Turkish, the official language of the State, was certainly not the dominant language in the province."
Lingua franca
Lingua francas have developed around the world throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages" facilitated trade) but also for cultural, religious, diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Romance-based pidgin language used by European merchants and sailors during the 2nd millennium. A world language – a language spoken internationally and learned and spoken by a large number of people – is a language that may function as a global lingua franca.
Greeks
For those that remained under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, religion was the defining characteristic of national groups ("milletler"), so the exonym "Greeks" ("Rumlar" from the name Rhomaioi) was applied by the Ottomans to all members of the Orthodox Church, regardless of their language or ethnic origin. The Greek speakers were the only ethnic group to actually call themselves "Romioi", (as opposed to being so named by others) and, at least those educated, considered their ethnicity ("genos") to be Hellenic. There were, however, many Greeks who escaped the second-class status of Christians inherent in the Ottoman millet system, according to which Muslims were explicitly awarded senior status and preferential treatment. These Greeks either emigrated, particularly to their fellow Orthodox Christian protector, the Russian Empire, or simply converted to Islam, often only very superficially and whilst remaining crypto-Christian. The most notable examples of large-scale conversion to Turkish Islam among those today defined as Greek Muslims—excluding those who had to convert as a matter of course on being recruited through the devshirme—were to be found in Crete (Cretan Turks), Greek Macedonia (for example among the Vallahades of western Macedonia), and among Pontic Greeks in the Pontic Alps and Armenian Highlands. Several Ottoman sultans and princes were also of part Greek origin, with mothers who were either Greek concubines or princesses from Byzantine noble families, one famous example being sultan Selim the Grim ( 1517–1520), whose mother Gülbahar Hatun was a Pontic Greek.
The roots of Greek success in the Ottoman Empire can be traced to the Greek tradition of education and commerce exemplified in the Phanariotes. It was the wealth of the extensive merchant class that provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the half century and more leading to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Not coincidentally, on the eve of 1821, the three most important centres of Greek learning were situated in Chios, Smyrna and Aivali, all three major centres of Greek commerce. Greek success was also favoured by Greek domination of the Eastern Orthodox church.
Lingua franca
The use of lingua francas has existed since antiquity. Latin and Koine Greek were the lingua francas of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic culture. Akkadian (died out during Classical antiquity) and then Aramaic remained the common languages of a large part of Western Asia from several earlier empires.
Ottoman court
Ottoman court or the culture that evolved around the court of the Ottoman Empire was known as the "Ottoman Way". To get a high position in the empire, one must have been skilled in the Way. It included both knowing Persian, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and how to behave in court, in front of the sultan, and in formal and religious occasions.
Culture of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman culture evolved over several centuries as the ruling administration of the Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the cultures of conquered lands and their peoples. There was a strong influence from the customs and languages of Islamic societies, notably Arabic, while Persian culture had a significant contribution through the heavily 
Persianized Seljuq Turks, the Ottomans' predecessors. Despite newer added amalgamations, the Ottoman dynasty, like their predecessors in the Sultanate of Rum and the Seljuk Empire, were thoroughly Persianised in their culture, language, habits and customs, and therefore, the empire has been described as a Persianate empire." Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire had substantial subject populations of Orthodox subjects, Armenians, Jews and Assyrians, who were allowed a certain amount of autonomy under the confessional "millet" system of Ottoman government, and whose distinctive cultures enriched that of the Ottoman state.
Ottoman Tunisia
Ottoman popular literature and much of the learning of its elites was expressed in the Turkish language. Turkish became the idiom for state business in Tunisia and its unique flavors percolated throughout Tunisian society. After Arabic and Persian, it is the third language of Islam and for centuries has "played a very important role in the intellectual life" of Muslim culture. In addition, the Turks brought their popular customs, such as their music, clothing, and the coffee house ("kahvehane" or "kiva han").
Turkey
Ottoman cuisine was influenced by Balkan, Arab, Byzantine, Kurdish, Persian and Armenian cuisines. The country's position between the East and the Mediterranean Sea helped the Turks gain complete control of major trade routes, and an ideal environment allowed plants and animals to flourish. Turkish cuisine was well established by the mid-1400s, the beginning of the Ottoman Empire's six hundred-year reign. Yogurt salads, fish in olive oil, sherbet and stuffed and wrapped vegetables became Turkish staples. The empire, eventually spanning from Austria to northern Africa, used its land and water routes to import exotic ingredients from all over the world. By the end of the 16th century, the Ottoman court housed over 1,400 live-in cooks and passed laws regulating the freshness of food. Since the fall of the empire in World War I (1914–1918) and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, foreign food such as French hollandaise sauce and western fast food have made their way into the modern Turkish diet.