Karamanli Turkish


Karamanlı Turkish, is both a form of written Turkish and a dialect of Turkish spoken by the Karamanlides, a community of Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians in Ottoman Turkey. While the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karamanlides used the Greek alphabet for writing their form of Turkish. Karamanlı Turkish had its own literary tradition and produced numerous published works in print in the 19th century, some of them published by Evangelinos Misailidis, by the Anatoli or Misailidis publishing house.
Karamanlı writers and speakers were expelled from Turkey as part of the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923. Some speakers preserved their language in the diaspora. The writing form stopped being used immediately after the Turkish state adopted the Latin alphabet.
A fragment of a manuscript written in Karamanlı was also found in the Cairo Geniza.

Media

There was a Karamanli Turkish newspaper, Anatoli, published from 1850 to 1922, made by Evangelinos Misailidis. Other publications in Karamanli were Anatol Ahteri, Angeliaforos, Angeliaforos coçuklar içun, Şafak, and Terakki. The second and third were created by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Demetrius Nicolaides also applied to make his own Karamanli publication, Asya, but was denied; he instead made an Ottoman Turkish newspaper called Servet. Evangelina Baltia and Ayșe Kavak, authors of "Publisher of the newspaper Konstantinoupolis for half a century," wrote that they could find no information explaining why Nicolaides' proposal was turned down.