> [!quote] [The Ottomans were one of the largest empires of all time, yet Turkish is not spoken as much around the world as many other languages. Was their influence not as significant over time as, let’s say, the British Empire?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/woo3fb/the_ottomans_were_one_of_the_largest_empires_of/) via [[rAskHistorians|AskHistorians]] on 2022-08-15 by [[u/Professional-Rent-62]] > > Ottoman Turkish was a language of administration and elite literature, and more or less died with the empire. > > First, like all of the big early modern multi-ethnic empires (Habsburgs, Mughals, Qing) the Ottoman Empire was multi-lingual. Arabic and Persian in particular, were languages with a lot of speakers and writers and a large corpus of religious and literary works. (They were also languages that educated Ottomans would learn in their own right.) There was also a clear divide between the formal spoken and above all written forms of each of these and the daily speech of ordinary people. Again, this is quite typical. > > There were always people who wrote in (and championed) “Simple Turkish” but the elite language was much more complex. So while Ottoman Turkish remained a language that the elite all over the empire would want to be able to deal with, it was not a common language of day to day speech and trade, even for “Turks” (however you define that term). Still there were lots of people all over the empire who used it, either for official documents or literary purposes, and there were lots of hybrid forms, such as the Aljamiado poetry written in the Albanian language with Arabic script and lots of Turkish and Persian vocabulary, or Karamanli-Turkish written in the Greek alphabet by Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians. > > When the empire fell, Ottoman Turkish was rejected or forgotten pretty much everywhere. This again is very typical. Modernizing states want a single national language, and almost always this involves rejecting some of the overly “ornate” and “cosmopolitan” elite language. This was particularly true in Turkey. In 1928 Ataturk decreed a new Turkish, written with the Western alphabet and with as little “foreign” influence as possible. Other modern states of the old empire were busy with their own linguistic nationalist projects, and this involved rejecting Ottoman Turkish and, of course, having no interest at all in the new modern Turkish. > [!quote] [The Ottomans were one of the largest empires of all time, yet Turkish is not spoken as much around the world as many other languages. Was their influence not as significant over time as, let’s say, the British Empire?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/woo3fb/the_ottomans_were_one_of_the_largest_empires_of/) via [[rAskHistorians|AskHistorians]] on 2022-08-15 by [[u/organisum]] > > In the OE, there was this concept called "The Three Languages". Those were the three distinguished languages according to the Ottoman view. Knowing those three languages was the mark of erudition and sophistication. First was, obviously, Ottoman Turkish, which is very similar to modern Turkish aside from the script. Then there was Persian. Persian was the language of court and literature before it was edged out by Ottoman Turkish, but it was still considered an acceptable language. Last there was Arabic, which was the legal and religious language of the OE. So native speakers of Arabic had little incentive to replace it with Turkish, and that's the main reason Turkish didn't become widespread among them. > > However, the Ottoman Empire had many subjects whose first language wasn't Turkish or Arabic. Let's take for example the Balkans. Several Balkan countries were in whole or in part conquered by the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. During that time, Turkish was absolutely spoken in what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia etc. It was practically mandatory to know Turkish well if you had business with Ottoman administration, court etc. So why didn't Turkish take deeper root there? > > First, because Turkish is very different from all other languages spoken on the Balkans. Turkish has a lot of cases, the sentence structure is much different, it's a difficult language if your first language is dissimilar to it. The Turkish state also never financed schools for non-Muslims. The Christian and Jewish Balkan communities financed their own schools out of donations, and naturally hired non-Turkish teachers who taught the children in their native languages. > > Second, because non-Muslim Balkan women had little need to learn Turkish. The only non-Muslim Balkan woman who would need to communicate with Ottoman administration, court, government, landlords etc would be a widow with no adult male relatives. In the very rare such cases, the widow would hire a Turkish, or at least a Muslim man, to represent her in front of the Ottoman authorities. This limited the spread of Turkish further. > > Third, because among non-Muslim Balkan people, Turkish (and Persian, and Arabic) were never considered prestigious languages. Turkish was the language of the hated occupants from the non-Muslim Balkan point of view. Prosperous non-Muslims on the Balkans wanted their children to learn Russian, French, or German, not Turkish. The high culture non-Muslims on the Balkans admired came from France, the Austrian Empire and/or the Russian Empire.