The Language Of Divan Poetry Is The Language Of The Empire

The language of Divan literature has always been introduced as a synthesis of three languages: Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Indeed, Ottoman Turkish that is the combination of these three is the essential of Divan literature. However, Divan poets also used words from Greek, Armenian, Italian, and some languages of Balkans and Caucasus besides Arabic and Persian words. Especially poets who were Rumelian or worked as the state officers for years were finding different ways of usage in their works with the expressions they borrowed from the Balkan languages. In ten verses of a poem of Mustafa Âlî of Gallipoli who was a bureaucrat, an intellectual and at the same time a poet and who had served as a statesman for a long time in the Balkans in the 16th century, there are expressions of Arabic, Persian, Albanian, Franc, Serbian, Greek, Manav, Bosnian and Chagatai people in their own languages and dialects. Based on this example, it would not be wrong to say that Divan poetry is a part of “a literature of an empire” and that the language is “an imperial language”. In conclusion, the language of Divan literature is an entire entity that has basically Ottoman Turkish as a dominant factor but also comprises many elements from the languages of the nations all around the Ottoman Empire.

Keywords

Mustafa Âlî From Gallipoli, Divan Litarature, Emparior Language, Balkan Language.