When the Arabs erupted out of Arabia in the Seventh Century and conquered most of the Middle East and Northern Africa, Arabic essentially replaced all of the languages spoken in those areas. On the other hand, when the Turks six hundred years later conquered most of the same territory (and Southeast Europe), Turkish did not replace Arabic. (I don’t think Turkish is spoken anywhere today but in Turkey.) Why didn’t Turkish replace Arabic in those lands in the 400 years of Turkish domination?
Short answer: The Ottomans left local cultures fairly intact and were there just to skim off the top. No religious or other need to change.
Well, not quite. The Persians went right on speaking Persian after the Arabs conquered the Sassanids, and Berber was and is still used in much of Morocco and Algeria. Arabic became standard in places with smaller populations or where larger numbers of Arabs immigrated.
I think that’s basically right, although Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Turkmen, and the like are all very closely related to Turkish.
I would guess it was partly the same reason that Arabic didn’t replace Persian or Berber; too many Arabs and not enough Turks to make a complete conversion. Furthermore, the Arabic language occupies a somewhat privileged place in the Msulim religion; the vast majority of Muslims consider the only true Qur’an to be the Arabic Qur’an. Translations are not the true Qur’an. Recitation of suras must be done in Arabic to be done properly. (My Uyghur father-in-law can recite many suras in Arabic, even though he has no idea what they mean). I think this was a strong disincentive for the Turks to try to suppress or wipe out the Arabic language, and encouraged the Turkish scholar class to learn Arabic.
As I understand it, there are small Turkish minorities throughout the Balkans, generally declining and with use of Turkish (language) declining even faster. Nowhere but Bulgaria outside Turkey itself do they constitute a significant part of the population.
Wikipedia’s article on the Turkic language family shows the relationships of Turkish proper to the other Turkic languages spoken in what was once called Turkestan – essentially Central Asia – and elsewhere. As I understand it, Gagauz (a minority language in Bulgaria) and Azerbaijani are distinct languages but generally mutually intelligible with Turkey Turkish – much like the Scandinavian languages. Remember that this is a complete language family, in total about as akin to each other as the Romance and Germanic families are internally.
I think it has to be the role of Arabic in Islam. It’s considered an essential part of the relgiion. So people have a strong motivation to learn it, and once you know it why would you adopt some other foreign language on top of it?
Bingo!
Worship in Islam is done in Arabic. Quotations during sermons are done in Arabic. You really aren’t reading the Koran unless it’s done in Arabic.
True, but this is a product of migrations and conquests predating the Ottoman Empire; the Turkic languages were present in those regions hundreds of years before Osman I started getting ideas.
The higher status of Arabic may have extended beyond the religious sphere, even in Turkey itself; when I was there last year, locals told me that until the empire ended in the 1920s official documents (such as title deeds) in Turkey were written in Arabic.
They were written in Arabic script, certainly, as Turkish has no alphabet of its own. Turkish was written using Arabic letters up until the 1920’s, when Attaturk decreed it be writen in Latin letters.
Incidentally, if the sole reason Arabic wasn’t replaced is religion, why are people still speaking Greek, Bulgarian and Rumanian?
Are you sure they didn’t mean that the documents were written using the Arabic script? Turkey switched to a form of the Roman alphabet in the 1920s.
Were they written in Arabic, or were they written in Turkish using the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which is derived from the Arabic alphabet? As part of the reforms of Ataturk, the Ottoman alphabet was replaced by the Roman alphabet in 1928.
Ha!
Much of the MENA converted to Arabic in the first few centuries following the Arab conquest. But it was never compulsory, merely induced by taxation. (There was a tax imposed on non-Muslims from which Muslims were exempt.)
Despite this, Lebanon retained a slim majority of Christians, and most of the other Arab regions continued to have significant non-Muslim minorities.
And, or course, the Arabs did not enter the Balkans (or even most of Anatolia); their only incursion into Europe (not counting the islands of Sicily and Malta) was at the other end of the continent, in Spain.
The Ottomans were even stranger – governing their Christian subjects through the Patriarch of Constantinople, for example. Only in Bosnia and Albania were there substantial elements of the populace converting to Islam. In fact, part of the reason for the rise of national churches in Orthodoxy was a desire not to be governed (in the name of the Sultan) by Phanariots, Greek Christians from the Phanar neighborhood of Constantinople.
Don’t know - it’s possible my informants were themselves unclear on this, since they probably couldn’t read what was written in the Arabic script.
Official Ottoman documents were recorded in either Arabic or Turkish or both ( probably context dependent, though I have no definitive cite for that ). Beyond that the Ottoman elite used a very imperial court-specific, flowery language that blended elements of Turkish ( primary ) Arabic and Persian. See the entry on Ottoman Turkish here
The Ottoman state in general was extremely polyglot and there was no attempt to impose the Turkish language until the very end, when elements of Turkish nationalism began to appear. Variants of Turkish were the command languages of the military, the court language, often ( but not exclusively, as above ) the legal language and the language of the Turkish peasantry. That was about it. This famous passage by the Lady Mary Wortley Monague, written in 1718, is often used as an example of the cosmopolitan nature of the Ottoman state:
In Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and, what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoken in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen, French, English and German, my Nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians, half a dozen other servants Greeks; my steward an Italian; my Janissaries Turks, that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect on the people who are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it.
Arabic spread so rapidly ( rather faster than Islam itself, actually ), because it was THE language of an enormous unitary state, in which Arabs formed a universal elite for generations and migrated as an adminstrative class and occasionally of whole tribes ( it was aggressive later medieval migrations of Bedouin such as the Banu Hilal and Banu Suleim, deliberately unleashed, that broke down Berber dominance in areas of Tunisia, Libya and Algeria ). Also it was already the dominant language of parts of Syria and Mesopotamia before the conquest.
The Turks, by contrast, never spread as a people beyond the pastoral zones of Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Khurasan, N. Iraq. They conquered nothing as vast as the early Caliphate and they generally made use of pre-existing Arab and Persian adminstrative classes. Early Turkish pentrations of North Africa ( Egypt ) for instance were purely as an imported military caste that was very deliberately segregated from society at large. The Ottomans established vassalage relationships in the same regions, only - Egypt continued to be governed by the conquered Mameluke caste for three centuries after their submission to Selim I. The Beys of the Maghrebine ports were much the same. They were only nominal subjects and their responsiveness to Ottoman authority waxed and waned with the strength and assertiveness of the central state.