Before Ataturk the written language in Turkey was Ottoman. It was an ornate language, using the Arabic script, which didn’t fit the phonetics of the language, and borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian. It did not coincide with the language spoken across Anatolia, which was reasonably similar to Turkish. The effect was to divide the people into the majority who were illiterate and a minority elite who knew how to read and write. Turkish was something looked down upon; it Click for more