Linguistic diversity and everyday life in the Ottoman cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans (late 19th–early 20th century)

Abstract

The paper intends to describe the language situation in major Ottoman urban centres in Europe, Asia and Africa during the last decades of Ottoman rule at the scale of family and everyday life. This limitation is necessary since important developments had taken place during the Tanzimat period leading to significant alterations in the population structure, in particular to an increase of the non-Muslim population. Major languages of urban communication used by the locals as well as by foreign residents, were in the late 19th Century Turkish, Greek, French and – in the Arabic provinces – Arabic. Among the languages of minor importance were Judaeo-Spanish, Armenian, and others. Apart from the role played by language in Ottoman urban culture in general, more specific aspects such as the effects of spatial segregation, multilingualism, and the diversity of accents and dialects, or registers are also be dealt with. As a matter of fact, the linguistic situation in most Ottoman cities was complex and variegated. The same applies to the sources used for this paper: they include travel accounts, tourist guides, conversation manuals, satirical papers, popular drama, fiction (novels), personal narratives, studies on slang and also the pictorial record. ☆ An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Ottoman Urban Studies Seminar organized by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi at ZMO Berlin (EUME programme, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) April 20, 2009.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.