Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What was the lingua franca of the Ottoman Empire?
The language of the court and government of the Ottoman Empire was Ottoman Turkish,[1] but many other languages were in contemporary use in parts of the empire. Although the minorities of the Ottoman Empire were free to use their language amongst themselves, if they needed to communicate with the government they had to use Ottoman Turkish.[2]
With the growth of the Spanish Empire, Spanish became established in the Americas, as well as in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania. It became the language of global trade until Napoleonic Wars and the breakup of the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the 19th century. Spanish was used as a lingua franca throughout the former Spanish Colonial Empire, including territory in present-day U.S., but particularly in present-day Mexico, Spanish Caribbean, Central, South America and the Philippines, and still remains the lingua franca within Hispanic America.
Whereas a vernacular language is the native language of a specific geographical community, a lingua franca is used beyond the boundaries of its original community, for trade, religious, political or academic reasons. For example, English is a vernacular in the United Kingdom but is used as a lingua franca in the Philippines. Arabic, French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, serve a similar purpose as industrial/educational lingua francas, across regional and national boundaries.
Lingua Franca left traces in present Algerian slang and Polari. There are traces even in geographical names, such as Cape Guardafui (that literally means cape "look and escape" in Lingua Franca and ancient Italian).
In Lingua Franca (the specific language), "lingua" means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and "franca" is related to "phrankoi" in Greek and "faranji" in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", but the name actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Empire.
Lingua Franca or lingua franca may also refer to:
Latin was the lingua franca of the early Roman Empire and later the Western Roman Empire, while particularly in the East indigenous languages such as Greek and to a lesser degree Egyptian and Aramaic language continued to be in use. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of the Middle Ages, not least because it became the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Koine Greek, which served as a lingua franca in the Eastern Empire, is still used today as a sacred language in some Eastern Orthodox churches.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir was a pidgin language used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th century.
The language became the lingua franca of educated groups, including Sephardic Jews, and versions of official documents in languages of non-Muslims such as the 1876 Ottoman Constitution originated from the French translations. Strauss wrote that the Treaty of Paris of 1856 "seems to have been translated from the French."[6] In addition, newspapers written in other western European languages had editions in French or editions with portions in French.[7]
Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) was the first scholar to investigate the Lingua Franca systematically. According to the monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins he developed, Lingua Franca was known by Mediterranean sailors including the Portuguese. When Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of Lingua Franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through a process of relexification, the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon was substituted by the languages of the peoples in contact.
Polish was a lingua franca in areas of Central and Eastern Europe, especially regions that belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish was for several centuries the main language spoken by the ruling classes in Lithuania and Ukraine, and the modern state of Belarus.[34] After the Partitions of Poland and the incorporation of most of the Polish areas into the Russian Empire as Congress Poland, the Russian language almost completely supplanted Polish.
The term "lingua franca" derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense used) of the region.
International auxiliary languages created with the purpose of being lingua francas such as Esperanto and Lingua Franca Nova have not had a great degree of adoption globally so they cannot be described as global lingua francas.
During the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, Arameans, the native speakers of Aramaic, began to settle in greater numbers, at first in Babylonia, and later in Assyria (Upper Mesopotamia, modern-day northern Iraq, northeast Syria, northwest Iran, and south eastern Turkey (what was Armenia at the time). The influx eventually resulted in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC) adopting an Akkadian-influenced Imperial Aramaic as the "lingua franca" of its empire. This policy was continued by the short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire and Medes, and all three empires became operationally bilingual in written sources, with Aramaic used alongside Akkadian. The Achaemenid Empire (539–323 BC) continued this tradition, and the extensive influence of these empires led to Aramaic gradually becoming the lingua franca of most of western Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Egypt.
Aramaic was the native language of the Aramaeans and became the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire and the western provinces of the Persian Empire, and was adopted by conquered peoples such as the Hebrews. A dialect of Old Aramaic developed into the literary language Syriac. The Syriacs, such as the Syriac-Aramaean, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, continued the use of Aramaic which ultimately evolved into the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Middle East.
This is a list of lingua francas. A lingua franca (English plural "lingua francas", although the pseudo-Latin form "linguae francae" is also seen) is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a first language, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both speakers' first languages.
Arabic, the native language of the Arabs, who originally came from the Arabian Peninsula, became the lingua franca of the Islamic (Arab) Empire (from CE 733 – 1492), which at its greatest extent was bordered by China and Northern India, Central Asia, Persia, Asia Minor, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and Portugal.
The use of lingua francas has existed since antiquity. Latin and Koine Greek were the lingua francas of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic culture. Akkadian (died out during Classical antiquity) and then Aramaic remained the common languages of a large part of Western Asia from several earlier empires. 
The "lingua franca" of the empire is the Beklan language.
Portuguese served as lingua franca in the Portuguese Empire, Africa, South America and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of lingua franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through a process of change the lingua franca and Portuguese lexicon was replaced with the languages of the people in contact.
"Lingua Franca" was where the Sokal Affair — a parody of academic practices and post-structuralist language — was first revealed; "Lingua Franca" editors later produced a book of selected papers on the subject, "The Sokal Hoax", published by the University of Nebraska Press.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca was largely based on Italian and Provençal. This language was spoken from the 11th to 19th centuries around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in the European commercial empires of Italian cities (Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Siena) and in trading ports located throughout the eastern Mediterranean rim.[31]
Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese served as both the written lingua franca and the diplomatic language in Far East Asia including China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and Vietnam. In the early 20th century, vernacular written Chinese replaced Classical Chinese within China as both the written and spoken lingua franca for speakers of different Chinese dialects, and because of the falling power and cultural influence of China in East Asia, English has since replaced Classical Chinese as the lingua franca in East Asia.
Classical Nahuatl was the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. An extensive corpus of the language as spoken exists. Like Latin and Hebrew (prior to the founding of modern Israel), Classical Nahuatl was more of a sociolect spoken among the elites (poets, priests, traders, teachers, bureaucrats) than a language spoken in any common family household.
The term was used to refer to the prison for hostages in Constantinople, which was near the bath-house, and thereafter all the slave quarters in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary regencies. The hostages of the Barbary pirates slept in the prisons at night, leaving during the day to work as laborers, galley slaves, or domestic servants. The communication between master and slave and between slaves of different origins was made in a "lingua franca" known as "Sabir" or Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Mediterranean pidgin language with Romance and Arabic vocabulary. 