Until the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the region of Macedonia, part of the Ottoman Empire, was remarkably multiethnic and multilingual. Because Macedonia was partitioned and annexed by various nation states as late as 1913, the kind of complex multilingualism that had given birth to the famous Balkan sprachbund (linguistic area) survived there longer than in other regions of the Balkans. Therefore, we have more detailed descriptions of this multilingualism by scholars and travelers than in other regions. This paper concentrates on the linguistic situation in the Central Balkan area around Lakes Ohrid and Prespa and also in Pelagonia, with the city of Bitola as its center – areas where the linguistic situation reported in late Ottoman times was particularly complex. Pieces of historical information about multilingualism are put into the context of the general linguistic situation in the Empire. In addition, the use of parallel columns in printed books, manuscripts, and private notebooks is discussed as an iconic expression of the sociolinguistic situation of the time.

In the course of expansion of its geographic range, the Arabic alphabet became applied to a great number of languages belonging to the most diverse linguistic families. In this field, Bosnian Aljamiado literature deserves special mention as it nowadays represents an authentic part of Bosnian national heritage. The aim of my contribution is to introduce and briefly describe the modified Arabic – Ottoman script used on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina which is generally known as Arebica. In this modified alphabet a not insignificant amount of literature was produced (16th–20th century), mostly poetry – love poems, religious poems (known as ilahijas) and political and didactical qasidas, mahzars or arzuhals. The prose appeared only in the 18th century and in a quite limited quantity and literary quality. My paper will further deal with the fact why the efforts to officially adopt Arebica as the third alphabet for Bosnian/Croat/ Serbian language alongside Latin and Cyrillic turned out as unsuccessful. Finally I would like to declare that my aspirations are purely scientific and I do not intend to be involved in any of the ongoing political disputes.

With a focus on the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world, this article considers how the city’s particularly rich and composite soundscape, linguascape and scriptworld around 1900 contributes to a vernacular poetics. Such a poetics, I suggest, could be described in terms of a heterolingual and multivernacular foregrounding of linguistic difference and asymmetry. Issues relating to the materiality of language and linguistic diversity, including the role of scripts, are explored in a selection of ten Western European travelogues and narratives set in Constantinople during the last period of the Ottoman era (1876–1922) and written in Italian (De Amicis), French (Loti), Danish (Jerichau-Baumann), Norwegian (Skram), and Swedish (Lindberg-Dovlette and Beyel). Proceeding from the soundscape via the linguascape to the scriptworld of the city, it is demonstrated how these ‘-scapes’ and worlds are established, rendered, thematised, transcribed, and inscribed as heterolingual, multivernacular and multiscriptal in Constantinople as a literary world. Different textual and paratextual strategies are identified and analysed with regard to their auditory, visual and material features. However, as a part of monoscriptal Western European literature using Roman script, this literary world becomes cosmopolitanised. In this case the vernacular poetics did not embrace the many scripts of Constantinople.

This is the introduction to a special issue on the "Social history of Ottoman languages." When historians approach the political and social implications of language choice in the early modern Ottoman Empire, they treat it as either selecting a proto-nationalist affiliation just part of an indistinct premodern non-identity. This introduction introduces alternative theoretical and conceptual frameworks to approach the question of language in the early modern Ottoman Empire. This dossier/special issue itself is dedicated to the question of the social history of language in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It brings a small group of leading and budding scholars to help provide new insights into the language of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it tries to demonstrate the diversity of languages in the Empire through essays on (pre-Ottoman) Turkish, Bosnian in the Arabic script, and Armenian.

Even though the Balkans constitute one of the most prominent examples of linguistic areas, little is known about the actual processes and mechanisms contributing to the shaping of this area. Most of the assumptions are based on macro-level analyses and describe the linguistic changes observed in terms of generalising tendencies such as increase in analytism or simplification of structures. In order to approach the processes underlying contact-driven change and area formation, however, the focus needs to be shifted to the micro-level, i.e. the individuals and their communicative practices. Among the rare sources allowing to assume this actor-centred perspective is Gjorgji Pulevski’s trilingual dictionary of Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish from 1875, which on the orthographic and morphological level allows for insight into a multilingual speaker’s perceptions the languages s/he is exposed to and makes use of in her/his every day communicative practice. The present paper discusses the structural parallels between Macedonian and Turkish observed in the dictionary. It illustrates in how far these parallels may contribute to our understanding of the specific kind of individual multilingualism that provided the basis for the morphosyntactic developments observed for the Balkan linguistic area, and may also help to shed light on the more general nature of these developments. It is suggested that these processes evince an increase in morphological transparency, i.e. morphem-to-function mapping, as the most salient and probably most effective outcome of largely imperfect multilingualism.

In this article, I will address the topic of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the interwar period through the interpretive lens of the "linguistic" or better "alphabetic" rights, placed in the context of the "Latinization" processes taking place in the wide Eurasian space, as well of the post-imperial sociopolitical dynamics. To this aim, I describe the interesting and little known case of the writing practices of the Turkish community in Bulgaria in the period between the two world wars. In particular, I take into account the repercussions of Atatürk's alphabetical reform in Bulgaria, demonstrating how the adoption of the Latin alphabet in Turkey represented a significant challenge for the country, triggering the fears of both the Bulgarian authorities and of the more conservative factions of the local Turkish community. In this context, I analyze the attitudes towards the Arabic and the Latin alphabet employed to write the Turkish language in the Balkan country, illustrating the reasons for the prohibition of the Turkish Latin alphabet, in an unprecedented combination of interests between Bulgarian authorities and Islamic religious leaders. I will try to show how in that specific historical moment, writing systems, far from being "neutral" communication elements, lent themselves to various manipulations of an ideological and political nature.