[2] Turkish was spoken by the majority of the people in Anatolia and by the majority of Muslims of the Balkans except in Albania, Bosnia, and various Aegean Sea islands; Persian was initially a literary and high-court language used by the educated in the Ottoman Empire before being displaced by Ottoman Turkish;[1] and Arabic, which was the legal and religious language of the empire,[1] was also spoken regionally, mainly in Arabia, North Africa, Mesopotamia and the Levant.

[citation needed] Educated Ottoman Turks spoke Arabic and Persian, as these were the main non-Turkish languages in the pre-Tanzimat era.

In the Balkan Peninsula, Slavic, Greek and Albanian speakers were the majority, but there were substantial communities of Turks and Romance-speaking Romanians, Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians.

[8] As a result of having multiple linguistic groups, the Ottoman authorities had government documents translated into other languages, especially in the pre-Tanzimat era.

[13] Throughout the empire's history, Turkish enjoyed official status,[1] having an important role as the lingua franca of the multilingual governing elite.

[10] Ziya Pasha wrote a satirical article about the difficulty of translating it into Arabic, suggesting that Ottoman Turkish needed to be changed to make governance easier.

[31] In 1915, the Arabic-language university Al-Kuliyya al-Ṣalaḥiyya (Ottoman Turkish: Salahaddin-i Eyyubî Külliyye-i islamiyyesi) was established in Jerusalem.

[1] The Persian-language paper Akhtar ("The Star") published Persian versions of Ottoman government documents, including the 1876 Constitution.

[37] Romanian was spoken in Dobruja, parts of Wallachia (Brăila, Giurgiu and Turnu Măgurele) and Moldavia (Budjak) annexed by the Ottoman Empire, the Danube shores, Yedisan (Transnistria) and the Temeşvar Eyalet.

When French-medium schools operated by Alliance Israelite Universelle opened in the 1860s, the position of Judaeo-Spanish began to weaken in the Ottoman Empire areas.

[41] As Westernisation increased during and after the Tanzimat era, French in particular became more prominent due to its status as a major language of philosophy, diplomacy, and science.

[44] In 1904, Lucy Mary Jane Garnett wrote that within Constantinople (Istanbul), "The generality of men, in official circles at least, speak French".

[38] Two factions opposing Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Armenian and Young Turk groups, both used French.

[46] According to Strauss, "In a way reminiscent of English in the contemporary world, French was almost omnipresent in the Ottoman lands.

[37] Strauss wrote that "one can safely assume that" the original drafts of the 1856 edict and some other laws were in French rather than Ottoman Turkish.

"[42] In particular versions of official documents in languages of non-Muslims such as the 1876 Constitution originated from the French translations.

[42] French was also officially the working language of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the period after the Crimean War.

[47] The cities of Constantinople, Beirut, Salonika (Thessaloniki) and Smyrna (İzmir) had domestically-published French-language newspapers.

[47] Spyridon Mavrogenis, employed in the imperial medical school as a professor, advocated for the usage of French.

Turkish and European parties had used Latin for formal diplomatic purposes, though it had shifted towards Italian with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca.