THE WORLD LEXICON

Ottoman Turkish / Lisân-ı Osmânî

Ottoman Turkish/ لسان عثمانى / Lisân-ı Osmânî (ISO 639-3: ota)

VALID SCRIPTS: Ottoman Persian, Orkhon (Archaic)

TONAL: No

Alphabet (IPA):

[i] [e] [y] [ø] [a] [u] [ɯ] [o]

[m] [n] [p] [b] [t] [d] [t͡ʃ] [d͡ʒ] ([c]) ([ɟ]) [k] [g] [f] [v] [s] [z] ([ɫ]) [ɾ] [ʒ] [h] [x] [l] [j] [ɰ]

Alphabet (Graphemes):

WORK IN PROGRESS

Info

Ottoman Turkish was a natural language which had its origins in the Ottoman Empire, now known as Turkey (ISO 3166: TR). It was used as a language of the higher classes of the Empire.

It was an Oghuz Turkic language (639-5: trk) and unlike Modern Turkish, it is written in the Perso-Arabic script. Turkey made the change from Ottoman Turkish to Modern Turkish in 1928. It is related closely to Azerbaijani and Turkmen .

It could have had up to 10 million speakers or more at its peak, though, as the Ottoman Emprire was diverse and literacy was estimated to be low, this figure is highly disputed.