The concept of “dialect” and the “classification of Turkish dialects” are among the controversial issues of Turkish. This study focuses on the concept of “dialect” and “Turkish dialects”. Fifty books on teaching Turkish language to foreigners published in a period of approximately one hundred years from Tanzimat to the Republic were scanned. Among these books, a corpus was created with the ones that draw attention to the dialects of Turkish. The dialect information in the books in this corpus was analyzed in terms of terminology and classification. In this context, it has been tried to reveal how the Turkish dialects spoken in the Anatolian region are named in the Turkish language teaching books written by foreigners and how Turkish languages are generally classified in the books. In addition, the books in the corpus were comparatively analyzed in terms of Türkiye Turkish dialect nomenclature and dialect classification, also called Ottoman Turkish, Istanbul Turkish, Tatar Turkish, Constantinople Turkish, etc. With this analysis, it was tried to determine in which years the subject was concentrated in the books published. In the research, in the Turkish language classifications in a period of about a hundred years from Tanzimat to the Republic, the perspective of the period on dialects is included. It is thought that this aspect of the research will contribute to today's dialect studies. The study is a qualitative research and was conducted with the document analysis method. Among the 50 books in the research corpus, it was determined that the subject was included in nine of 17 English books, nine of 17 German books, seven of 10 French books, one Italian, one Latin and one Russian book. In terms of nomenclature, the most commonly used names were Tatar (13 books), Ottoman (12 books) and Constantinople (9 books). In addition to these, the concept of Stambul/Istanbul was also encountered, albeit to a lesser extent. Approximately one fifth of the books (6 books) contain information about more than one dialect of Turkish. While there are detailed expressions about dialects in five books, it is stated that there are different dialects of Turkish language in one book without giving a name. In the remaining 25 books, information on Tatar, Ottoman, Constantinople, Stambul, and the Turkish dialect of Turkey were identified without dwelling on different dialects.
Dialect, grammar books, Ottoman Turkish, teaching Turkish to foreigners, Turkic languages.