AHC: Ottoman Turkish is lingua franca of Middle-East

As the title says, Ottoman Turkish is the lingua franca of the Middle-East. How can the Ottoman Empire implemented it within their territories, aside from language of the elites and administration?

The case is like the similar legacies of the British Empire of English in most of their former colonies.
 
As the title says, Ottoman Turkish is the lingua franca of the Middle-East. How can the Ottoman Empire implemented it within their territories, aside from language of the elites and administration?

The case is like the similar legacies of the British Empire of English in most of their former colonies.
It could be posible but only some of spheres. It already faced competition from arabig (lenguage of scholars, judges, religion,law and science) and Persian (lenguage of the court, diplomacy, poetry and upper class culture). Turkish itself was marginalized by the government as it was seen as the lenguage of anatolian peasants.
 
Not sure how realistic this is, but maybe if the Sublime Porte was able to push through more educational reform and open up more western-style universities in the 18th and 19th centuries?
 
Just have the Ottomans industrialize in the 20th Century and they will have the power and prestige to pull this off pretty easily. Ottoman Turkish had a lot of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. This would make it easier for those two groups to learn and want to learn Turkish. Just like the loanwords in Chinese/Korean/Japanese help the people in those countries learn each others language even though they are all from different language families.
 
As the title says, Ottoman Turkish is the lingua franca of the Middle-East. How can the Ottoman Empire implemented it within their territories, aside from language of the elites and administration?

The case is like the similar legacies of the British Empire of English in most of their former colonies.

The Military Class was already Turkish. The Devshirme were Turkified. Maybe adding Turkish Clergy to Religious institutions of Muslims in the Levant and Egypt.

But most important is education. If Madrassah and later universities have Turkish as primary Language then it can also affect positively. But what would their drive be? They did not get nationalistic till mid 19th century.
 

Marc

Donor
Ottoman Turkish I believe wasn't spoken by even a substantial number of Turks within their empire. And why would it be adopted when there already were working alternatives?
 
Ottoman Turkish I believe wasn't spoken by even a substantial number of Turks within their empire. And why would it be adopted when there already were working alternatives?
Its uninteligible for lower classes (aka most of the population) because of the high number of arabic and persian loanwords but I don't know if the turkified muslims of the can understand it, I would guess not, since most of the turkification was not only the product of convertion to islam but also intermerriage and dayly interaction with migrated anatolian turks, who were a small but influencial minority among balkan muslims. So I doubt they would speak such exclusivist court lenguage. Of course if the Ottomans achieve to modernice and keep their territories into the 19th and 20th centuries its quite likely that education imposes ottoman turkish on the turks (or maybe a compromise in reached with a reformed ottoman with less loanwords but not the purist aproach of Ataturk) and spreads ottoman among the most educated on the arab regions.
 
Top