Italian was the only European language usable across the Ottoman lands until the 1800s

Evidence

There were a number of practical problems faced by both Western tourists in the Middle East and Eastern travelers to the West. One obviously was lan­ guage. Nobody in the West knew any Turkish, very few knew any Arabic, and nobody in the Middle East knew English or even French, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The only European language that was known at all was Italian, the dominant Mediterranean language, which was widely used in the Ottoman lands. Most of the interpreters who served as a medium of com­ munication between foreign diplomats and foreign merchants and local author­ ities did so in Italian, usually through two-stage translation. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the problem of language becomes much easier. Turks and then others, realized that they had to learn Western languages in order to communicate with the modern world, and a knowledge first of Italian, then of French and later of English, became very widespread in all these lands. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 783

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme in this period book of East-West contact, especially the asymmetric linguistic burden that later shifts to non-Westerners learning European languages.