Ottoman Turkish - the empire's Persianized language, used for poetry and administration. Ataturk's language reform put it to rest as a relic of its namesake, no longer needed by a republic. Barring the decisive Turkish republican victory in the 1920's, was the court language's displacement in favor of the common people's Turkish inevitable? Could its rich history and established use, hypothetically backed by expanded education, survive as a written and possibly spoken register in an Ottoman state that somehow limps along, or was it an upper-class shibboleth that could not survive the growth of literacy and national consciousness? As I'm typing, another possibility comes to mind: could it awkwardly coexist with organic Turkish well into modern times, becoming a fixture of debate and even controversy, much like Nynorsk/Bokmål in Norway and Gheg/Tosk in Albania?
Did the Ottoman Turkish language have a chance?
- Thread starter RonaldReagram
- Start date
have the Ottomans support the Turkish National Movement and collaborate with Ataturk. Done. Abdulmejid II was on his way to convince Mehmed VI to join with the TNA but was stopped and kept in house arrest. That free's up around ~20,000 and ~70,000 Ottoman troops to fight together against the French and Greeks as well. Ataturk did try to reconcile the monarchy with the growing new turkish nationalism during the earlier stages of the war but decided not to after Abdulmejid II was kept in house arrest.
I didn’t know that. Did he originally want a constitutional Monarchy similar to the U.K.?🤔
A purely ceremonial monarchy, though the caliphate would retain some religious powers, according to Inonu's early plan IRC.
Continued existence of a widely accepted religious authority of Sunni Islam? An awful lot, to put it mildly.
I have heard it suggested that, especially in the context not only of widespread illiteracy but given the existence of a multilingual population in rump Turkey including very large numbers of refugees, the 1920s was a rare moment in what was a new lingua franca could be imposed.
Techincally, bar some weird lexical choices that accompanied a lot of the removal of the Perso-Arabic vocabulary, Modern Turkish is basically a continuation of Ottoman Turkish (particularly a simplified "new" version that arose within the context of the growth of modern journalism and popular literature) written in the Latin script. In that case, it was never really displaced as a court language but was brought closer to the language of the people (although much of the "people" here were educated "middle-class" (relatively speaking) Istanbullular). However, even then one of the main problems before the language reform was script reform, whether it be reforming the Perso-Arabic script or switching over to something else. Once you move to something else, though, then that undermines the whole rationale (from a modernizer's point of view) of retaining all of the Perso-Arabic vocabulary. Nor is this a new impulse - the creation of Standard Modern Greek involved quite a lot of purging of foreign vocabulary, as did modern Romanian (through minimizing the Slavic and Turkic influence on the language and emphasizing its Latin origins). All Turkish underwent under Ataturk was nothing new in that case, even in the widespread fawning over French (also found in Romanian, as well as mass borrowing of Italian loanwords).