The Standardization of Ottoman-Turkish after 1839

In the 19th century Ottoman economy and society were incorporated into the "world-economy" while at the same time the Ottoman bureaucracy not only was able to keep up their social and political positions but even succeeded to expand them. This meant maintaining the right to skim of the surplus through taxes and fees but also the continuity of their political and even their ideological and linguistic influence upon the socio-economic sphere. Up to about 1826 the traditional pre-capitalistic and restrictively controlled mode of economy had continued to exist although traces of more liberal tendencies already became apparent. In the ensuing time, up to about 1860 free trade and economic liberalism dominated. Subsequently there set in a gradual abandoning of the all too extensive "laissez-faire" policy going, nevertheless, hand in hand with an ever growing indebtedness of the state which finally led to the installation of the international Public Debt Administration in 1881. In the Tanziamt period the Ottoman elite were confronted with European concepts of social and economic theories for the first time. In the course of this confrontation liberalism was strongest represented in the Ottman lands. Up to the sixties non-Muslims were dominant in the reception of new socio-economic concepts, then Muslims, too, began to get down to these problems and questions. In the literary language these ideas were reflected in numerous articles in different newspapers ( the beginnings of which are also to be found in the time of the Tanzimat), in translations of European books or essays (mainly translated from the French) and later in works independently composed by Ottoman authors dealing with socio- economic issues. In studies on the Ottoman socio-economic history of the 19th century, questions about the formation of notions and concepts as well as of processes of standardization in the Ottoman-Turkish vocabulary are repeatedly posed, but up to now there does not exist any comprehensive study about this subject. The project presented here intends to show which sort of linguistic effects the "globalization of the 19th century" did have upon the language in a non-colonial surrounding, as is the case with the Ottoman Empire. The processes of standarization in regard to the Ottoman- Turkish socio-economic vocabulary of the Tanzimat period can show the necessities and possibilities of language formation against a diachronic background. Special attention will be directed to the relevant ideological aspects in this regard. This means a study of the intellectual and cultural background of the individual Ottoman language reformers and authors of the 19th century as well as the inclusion of the traditional religious basis of language on the one hand and the then secularising view upon society and economy on the other - a conflict seemingly determining the Ottoman-Turkish ideas in the Tanzimat in general.

The goal of the present project was to investigate some tendencies of standardization of the 19th -century Ottoman- Turkish socio-economic language, focussing on the so-called Tanzimat Period, i.e. the reform period before Sultan Abdülhamid`s reign. It was during this period that modern socio-economic theories were first discussed in the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning European treatises political economy were translated into Ottoman from their French versions, later on more works were independently written in Ottoman. For the present study a selection of literary sources of the above-mentioned kind were used. At the same time, an attempt was made at combining the linguistic, ideological, and social developments in the 19th -century Ottoman Empire. Thereby it was possible to elucidate the mentality and the intellectual background of the various personalities dealing with socio-economic questions, a rather marginal subject of discourse in the Ottoman Empire. This is the first study dealing with the phenomenon of notion formation, re-interpretation, and revival of elements from the traditional language, as well as the adoption of European lexical material regarding the lexical field of economy and society. During the period of the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the 19th -century world economy system, it seems that four main tendencies can be observed: On the one hand, notions continued to be used in their traditional or slightly modified meaning. On the other hand, going beyond the Islamic socio-economic tradition, lexical items were formed by combining words from the Ottoman lexical stock (mainly derived from Arabic and Persian roots). The third group consists of foreign words to a large extent adopted from the Italian. Finally, quite a number of notions had to be paraphrased due to the lack of an adequate abstract word in the Ottoman language. The more abstract a new European notion was the more difficult it was to find an equivalent.