History of Teaching of Turkish in Europe

The present entry is a survey on learning and teaching of Ottoman Turkish in Europe from the first quarter of the 16th c. until the 19th c. The main target learners of the teaching material produced in the first few centuries were merchants and diplomats, and later missionaries. The significant production of dictionaries, grammars and phrase books, both printed and manuscript, occurred in the17th c. and 18th c., whereas the 19th c. was characterized by a more practical approach to language teaching. Several European states, beginning with Venice and France, instituted a system called 'language youth' in order to teach young dragomans-to-be in Constantinople. The most current languages in which Turkish grammars were written until the beginning of the 20th c. are Latin, Italian, German, French, and English.