The project explores how literacy based on the Arabic script and four languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Slavic) was used to comment on and/or regulate socio-political realities in Ottoman-ruled South Slavia between ca. 1550 and ca. 1750. Distancing itself from monoglot ideologies and teleologies of the histories of languages and literatures, the project investigates how concrete historical individuals or groups used the written word and chose among available idioms to (re)shape their own position in society or to establish relationships with standing institutions and realities. Engaging with existing scholarship on Ottoman sociocultural history and various neighboring contexts, which often place heavy emphasis on religious and ethno-national diversity, the project further unravels the complexity of coexistence in the region. To this end, it systematically analyzes a quadrilingual corpus of primary sources, aiming to identify, describe, and contextualize patterns of linguistic choices that reveal interpretive communities whose members shared historical experiences and ideas about literacy and language use.