Slavic Words in Arabographic Discourse. A Late Medieval Serbian Law and Its Early Modern Ottoman Users

This chapter highlights the complexities of early modern multilingualism in the Ottoman Empire in general, and the Ottoman-ruled South Slavia in particular. It presents the case study of a text written in late-medieval Slavic, which was a site of protracted, changing, and ideologically laden engagement of Turkish speakers with the Slavic language during the early modern period. The text in question is a law code promulgated by Stefan Lazarević of Serbia in the early fifteenth century. This law code, specifically the section regulating mining operations and the mining business, served as the source for a series of texts in Turkish which formed the core of the Ottoman legal discourse pertaining to mining. By analyzing the relationship between the Slavic hypotext and a series of Turkish hypertexts—marked by heteroglossia, most prominently reflected in the Slavophone Arabographic elements of the discourse, that is, Slavic words and phrases written in Arabic script—from the perspective of historical language ideology, this chapter identifies the layers of the Ottoman mining discourse, the formal characteristics of which illustrate the attitudes of the textualizers of the Ottoman mining laws towards (South-) Slavic language(s) and, by implication, their speakers.