Arabic was one of the elsine-i s̲elās̲e ‘the three languages’, which constituted the basis of Ottoman elite culture. Thus, the Ottoman Empire can be described as part of a historical space-time characterized by the use of Arabic as a means of communication, which in analogy to Fragner's concept of ‘Persophonie’ can be named ‘Arabophonia’ (Fragner 1999). In the Ottoman Empire, in addition to its function as an ethnic language in the Arab provinces, Arabic was cultivated as the language of Islam and, mo…