On The Turkish Of The Bilinguals In The Travel Book (Seyahatname) Of Evliya Çelebi

Written in the 17th century, the tarvel book of Evliya Çelebi is the richest source as it gives information about the peoples, cultures, languages, and dialects existing not only within the Ottoman border but in the whole region. Due to the rich content it has, the Travel Book of Evliya Çelebi has been studied meticulouly in many fields. Though Evliya Çelebi serves as an important source for the historians, ethnologists, sociologists, linguists, etc., he was neither a linguist nor a historian or a socilogist. The languages, dialects or accents that Evliya Çelebi mentioned in his book have been studie by several researchers. There is so much and significant information in his book about the literary Turkish of that time, many foreign languages, some dialects of Turkish. Besides, the information he gave about the Turkish of the bilinguals living in the Ottoman Empire is so rich that it is next to impossible to find such information in another source. In the Travel Book of Evliya Çelebi, the bilinguals were given as speaking literary Turkish; however, there are a number of samples in which they speak without using the literary language. In this article, I have given brief information about the language types found in the Travel Book of Evliya Çelebi. Then, I have studied the speeches and sentences of the bilinguals in the book as shown by Evliya Çelebi. I have tried to show, as presented in the book, when and under what circumstances the bilinguals were made to speak literary Turkish and a specific dialect.

Keywords

The Travel Book of Evliya Çelebi, Bilingualism, Bilingualism in the Ottoman Empire