In this paper I will discuss the linguistic pluralities of the Ottoman past by juxtaposing the oral traditions of the Slavic-speaking people in the northern Balkans and narratives written in Ottoman Turkish. The purpose is to show that discussion on both the slavic oral tradition and the Ottoman textual narratives may point at the interdependence of oral and textual histories in the creation of the knowledge about the past. I will also analyze the incorporation of an Ottoman dynastic tradition into the oral traditions of the slavic-speaking people in the northern Balkans. My discussion on a "folk" song recorded in the slavic language spoken in the Balkans, which shows a remarkable similarity with the events taking place in the 1470s of which we know from the Ottoman documents, will demonstrate one of the many ways of how knowledge about the past was produced and used in the Ottoman Balkans. The comparison of both "oral histories" and documentary sources may serve us to counter the claim of the nationalistic historiographies in the Balkans, which regard the Ottoman period as a rupture in the historical experience of the people in the region. I will argue that when oral and textual sources are discussed in a single effort to understand the creation of historical knowledge, the Ottoman political and military elite and the Slavic people in the Balkans, supposedly two alienated groups, appear not to have constructed their ideas about the past in hermetically sealed spaces. Rather, the ways in which they both narrated about each other resembles a dialog or an exchange of ideas within a community in which identities and visions of the past were not always determined by religious and linguistic bounds. I will also analyze the introduction of a new vocabulary in the Ottoman textual accounts and the south-slavic oral tradition. The introduction of slavic words and phrases into the Ottoman historical narratives as well as the proliferation of Ottoman vocabulary in the south-slavic oral traditions created temporal distancing between the times of narration and the events from the past. I will also show that the slavic language spoken in the Balkans, especially in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, was frequently incorporated in narratives about the Ottoman past and I will discuss the cultural context of those occurrences.