ABSTRACT
Language and power are closely connected, and there is a correlation between political and linguistic dominance. This chapter provides a brief overview of the language situation in the pre-Tanzimat era. It examines the position of the Turkish language in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multilingual Ottoman Empire during the last decades of its existence and the correlation between language and the empire's political decline. In the pre-Tanzimat era and before the emergence of Balkan nationalism, some languages spoken in the Balkans seem to have been in the precarious position of 'dominated languages'. The language issue played an important role in all multi-ethnic empires during the age of nationalism. In the major urban settlements of European Turkey in the late nineteenth century Turkish was rarely the dominant language. Ideas can also be found with certain Ottoman intellectuals like Namik Kemal, or later with Ziya Gokalp, that represent a sort of Ottoman linguistic 'Jacobinism'.
