ABSTRACT
The religion-based presence of different writing systems established at the turn of the Second Millennium (see Map 4) continued in Central Europe largely unchanged until the sixteenth century. However, the founding of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and the Balkans added the Arabic abjad (consonantry) to this region. The traditional Greek and Cyrillic alphabets remained in the service of the non-territorial autonomous Rum (Roman) millet of Orthodox Christians. However, the empire’s Muslim elite employed the Arabic language of the Quran for religious and legal purposes, alongside Osmanlıca (Ottoman or Old Turkish) and Persian for administration and cultural (literary) pursuits, respectively. Osmanlıca was produced as an Einzelsprache (language) by the application of Arabic letters for writing the speech of Anatolia’s Turkic-speakers. In this process, Osmanlıca was infused with a lot of high-prestige Semitic Arabisms (especially connected to Islam and religious practices) and Indo-European Persianisms (connected to court culture), making this language sufficiently elitist for the use at the Ottoman Sultan’s court. In 1517, the Ottomans conquered the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo (Egypt), which had claimed to be a continuation of the Abbasid Caliphate. As a result, the Ottoman Sultan became Caliph. His claim to the title was fortified by the Sharifate (Emirate) of Mecca’s recognition of this declaration in return for the Ottomans’ promise to respect the Sharifate’s autonomy. Subsequently, the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph was able to credibly adopt Islam’s most sought-for title of the Defender of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. These developments, in turn, elevated the overall prestige of Turkic Osmanlıca as an Einzelsprache.
