Ottoman Turkish
From Halbeeg, the open encyclopedia · Af-Soomaali
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Ottoman Turkish (Turkish: Osmanlıca or Osmanlı Türkçesi) was the form of the Turkish language used in the administration, literature, and official documents of the Ottoman Empire. It belonged to the Turkish language family, but its vocabulary and parts of its sentence structure were heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian.
The language was written in a modified Arabic script adapted to represent Turkish sounds. It was not an entirely different language from Turkish as spoken today, but differed in register. The higher literary and administrative registers were densely populated with Arabic and Persian words, whereas the colloquial Turkish spoken by ordinary people remained closer to Turkish in its original form.
Language registers
Scholars commonly divide the language into three registers: the formal literary register (fasih), the middle register of administration and documents, and the general colloquial register (kaba). These registers differed in the quantity of Arabic and Persian words they contained and in their use of Persian grammatical patterns such as the izafet construction for connecting nouns.
Writing and structure
The Arabic script used did not fully represent the five to seven consonants of Turkish, making reading dependent on word context. Words borrowed from Arabic were typically written as they appeared in the original, even though their pronunciation in Turkish had changed. The fundamental grammar—such as agglutination and the mobility of the final verb marker in a sentence—remained Turkish.
Changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
During and after the Tanzimat period, the growth of newspapers and education prompted debate over language simplification. Many writers began using a language closer to colloquial speech. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, two major changes were made: the adoption of Latin script in 1928, and efforts to replace Arabic and Persian words with Turkish equivalents. Because of these changes, Ottoman texts now require specialized knowledge to read.