Ottoman Turkish

Ottoman Turkish was the standardized register of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire, in use from the fourteenth century into the twentieth. It borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian in vocabulary and grammar and was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a form of the Perso-Arabic script. Because of those borrowings it was largely unintelligible to rural Turks, who kept speaking a plainer everyday Turkish with far fewer foreign loanwords, and that speech became the basis of the modern standard. Scholars divide its history into Old Ottoman Turkish, used until the sixteenth century, Middle or Classical Ottoman Turkish, the language of poetry and administration until the Tanzimat reforms, and New Ottoman Turkish, shaped from the 1850s by journalism and Western-oriented literature. It was promoted as a court language under Mehmed II. After the Republic of Turkey was founded, the language reforms of 1928 under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk replaced the Arabic script with an extended Latin alphabet and swapped many Persian and Arabic loanwords for Turkish equivalents.