Ottoman Turkish

In the early 1500s, the Ottoman Turks conquered the majority of what is now Turkey. The Ottoman Turks ruled for centuries and during that time, their language, Ottoman Turkish, became the dominant language of the region. Ottoman Turkish is a Turkic language, related to other Turkic languages like Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Uzbek. It is also related to Turkish, the language spoken in modern Turkey. Ottoman Turkish was written in a version of the Arabic alphabet. During the Ottoman period, many Turkish words were borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Ottoman Turkish also borrowed words from European languages, particularly French and Italian. As the Ottoman Empire declined in the 1800s, the use of Ottoman Turkish also declined. In 1928, the Turkish Republic officially switched to using the Latin alphabet, and the use of Ottoman Turkish declined even further. Today, there are only a few thousand speakers of Ottoman Turkish. Most of them are older people who learned the language as children. Ottoman Turkish is no longer taught in schools, and most young people in Turkey do not know how to speak it. However, there is renewed interest in the language among some scholars and Turks living outside of Turkey.