Until 1839, the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, did not have an official language. Velikaya Porta was a multinational and multilingual state.
The population of the empire was religiously divided into communities - millets. There were four main millets: Muslim, Roman (Orthodox), Jewish, Catholic-Armenian. Each millet had its own administration and its own language of office. In Muslim - Arabic, in Orthodox - Greek and Church Slavonic, in Judaic - Ladino, etc. There were also popular dialects: Turkic, Slavic, Greek. Since the empire was dominated by the Muslim millet, which was headed by the sultan himself, the Arabic language was in the leading roles. The language of fiction was the Persian language.
The languages were mixed. A mixture of Turkish folk dialects, Arabic and Persian languages, the so-called Ottoman language in 1839, during the period of transit (political reforms) was declared the state language. In 1851, the historian Ahmed Jevlet Pasha and the future Grand Vizier Mehmed Fuat Pasha published the first grammar of the Ottoman language.
There were 10-15 percent of Turkic words in the Ottoman language. More than 80 percent of the vocabulary consisted of Arabic and Persian borrowings. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, heated debates erupted over the improvement of the language. The disputes ended already in the Republic of Turkey with the language reform of 1928. Then the new Turkish language was actually created.
It was based on the Cypriot dialect and the urban dialect of Ankara. The Arabic alphabet, on which the writing of the Ottoman language was built, was replaced by the Latin alphabet. Writing in Arabic letters is prohibited by law.
The vocabulary has undergone significant changes. The number of words borrowed from Arabic and Persian dropped to about 30 percent. Basically, they were replaced by “native Turkish” words, that is, hastily concocted neologisms. Taken away