Ottoman Turkish
Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and therefore the Seljuq
Turks, who are both considered the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the executive language of those states acquired an outsized collection of loanwords from
Arabic and Persian.
Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters and an excellent quantity of imported words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (c. 1299–1922) is termed Ottoman
Turkish, which was a mix of
Turkish,
Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably and was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday
Turkish. The everyday
Turkish, referred to as Kaba Türkçe or "rough
Turkish," spoken by the less-educated lower and also rural members of society, contained a better percentage of native vocabulary and served as the basis for the fashionable
Turkish language.
Language reform and modern Turkish
After the inspiration of the fashionable state of
Turkey and therefore the script reform, the
Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Ataturk Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on
Turkish. one of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to exchange loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with
Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words within the press, the association removed several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old
Turkish words that had not been used for hundreds of years. Owing to this sudden change within the language, older and younger people in
Turkey began to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of
Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It's considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a method of Ottoman which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be "translated" 3 times into modern
Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and last in 1995. The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new
Turkish words to precise new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from
English. Many of those new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words that sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as bölem to exchange fırka, "political party"—also did not meet with popular approval (fırka has been replaced by the
French loanword party). Some words restored from Old
Turkic have taken on specialized meanings; for instance, batik (originally meaning "book") is now wont to mean "script" in computing.