The Ottoman Turkish alphabet (Ottoman Turkish: الفبا, romanized: elifbâ) is a version of the Perso-Arabic script used to write Ottoman Turkish for over 600 years until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.
Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in this script, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sometimes wrote it in other scripts, including Armenian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets.
Turkish (Türkçe [ˈtyɾktʃe], Türk dili, also known as Türkiye Türkçesi 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world.
To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with the Latin script-based Turkish alphabet.
Ottoman Turkish (لسان عثمانی, Lisân-ı Osmânî, Turkish pronunciation: [liˈsaːnɯ osˈmaːniː]; Turkish: Osmanlıca) was the standardized register of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire (14th to 20th centuries CE). It borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Persian and Arabic (through Persian). It was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to rural Turks, who continued to use kaba Türkçe ("raw/vulgar Turkish"; compare Vulgar Latin and Demotic Greek), which used far fewer foreign loanwords and is the basis of the modern standard. The Tanzimât era (1839–1876) saw the application of the term "Ottoman" when referring to the language (لسان عثمانی lisân-ı Osmânî or عثمانلیجه Osmanlıca); Modern Turkish uses the same terms when referring to the language of that era (Osmanlıca and Osmanlı Türkçesi). More generically, the Turkish language was called تركچه Türkçe or تركی Türkî "Turkish".
Old Turkish or Old Anatolian Turkish (Latin Turkish: Eski Türkçe/Eski Anadolu Türkçesi, Turco-Arabic: تورکچهسی اسکی تورکچه اسکی انادولو), also referred to as Old Anatolian Turkic (Turkish: Eski Anadolu Türkisi, Old Turkish: انادولو تورکیسی اسکی), was the form of the Turkish language spoken in Anatolia from the 11th to 15th centuries. It is also called Turkce or Turki, it developed into Early Ottoman Turkish and Middle Azerbaijani. It was written in the Perso-Arabic script. Unlike in later Ottoman Turkish, short-vowel diacritics were used.
It had no official status until 1277, when Mehmet I of Karaman declared a firman in an attempt to break the dominance of Persian:
The Turkish alphabet reform (Turkish: Harf Devrimi or Harf İnkılâbı) is the general term used to refer to the process of adopting and applying a new alphabet in Turkey, which occurred with the enactment of Law No. 1353 on "Acceptance and Application of Turkish Letters" on 1 November 1928. The law was published in the Official Gazette on 3 November 1928, and came into effect on that day. With the approval of this law, the validity of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which was based on the Arabic script, came to an end, and the modern Turkish alphabet based on the Latin script was introduced.
The Turkish alphabet differs somewhat from the alphabets used in other languages that use the Latin script. It includes letters modified to represent the sounds of the Turkish language (e.g., Ç, Ö, Ü), including some unused in other languages (Ş, Ğ, contrasting dotted and undotted İ / I). The pronunciation of some letters in the Turkish alphabet also differs from the pronunciation of said letters in most other languages using the Latin alphabet. For example, the pronunciation of the letter C in the Turkish alphabet is /d͡ʒ/, the equivalent of J in English, whereas in the English alphabet, it represents the /k/ or /s/ sound.
The Armeno-Turkish alphabet is a version of the Armenian script sometimes used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet was introduced. The Armenian script was not just used by ethnic Armenians to write the Turkish language, but also by the non-Armenian Ottoman Turkish elite.
An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 called the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish.
The Elifba alphabet (Elifba Albanian: ئەلیفبایا ئارابۋ-شكېپ, Albanian: Elifbaja, from Ottoman Turkish: الفبا, romanized: Elifbâ) was one of the main writing system for the Albanian language during the time of the Ottoman Empire from 19th century to 1911. This Albanian variant of the Abjad Ottoman was used to write the Albanian language. The last version of the Elifbaja shqip was invented by the rilindas, Rexhep Voka (1847-1917). Although the first standardized Albanian script based on the Arabic alphabet was published in the 1800s, Sufi Albanian poets began composing poetry in Albanian using the Arabic script as early as the late 17th century.