Turkish speech marked a governing caste above Arabic-speaking Egyptians

Evidence

This linguistic basis for differentiating between officers and soldiers was characteristic of the civil bureaucracy as well. Members of the high echelons of the bureaucracy and the “aristocracy” at large were Turkish-speaking, people from all over the Ottoman world who had come to Egypt seeking employment in the Pasha’s administration and, depending on their connections, would be given a position in the civil service. Indeed, the “meanest man who [spoke] Turkish [was] ipso facto considered as belonging to a caste high above the indigenous inhabitant.” Lower down on the administrative scale Arabic was more common, giving rise to a duality in administrative language that often caused considerable confusion and ambiguity. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1325

Categorization

• SHARE: The quoted contemporary observation that the meanest Turkish speaker outranked any native Egyptian would delight a colleague working on Ottoman-language hierarchies.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing knowledge of Ottoman millet and elite-bureaucratic caste structures in Milgrom’s law-merchant and trust scholarship readings.