ABSTRACT
Introduction As a linguistic tenn, 'Ottoman' denotes the fonn ofTurkic which became the official and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. This was, essentially, the variety of West Oghuz Turkic (p. 82) which developed in Anatolia after that region was settled by Oghuz Turks in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.
Historical Development The earliest surviving frrmly datable Turkish works to which an Anatolian provenance can be confidently attributed belong to the thirteenth century, and clearly predate the emergence of an Ottoman principality. The Seljuk dynasty which had ruled most of Turkish Anatolia since the late eleventh century did not either use Turkish for official purposes or encourage its use in literature. It was around the end of the thirteenth century, with the replacement of Seljuk power by a multiplicity of small principalities whose rulers had not been connected with the Persianised Seljuk court, that Turkish began to be used as the language of administration. There was then a concomitant upsurge of Turkish literary activity, much of it religio-didactic in character, and often consisting of translation or adaptation from Persian.
