Focusing on the novels of Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem and Ahmet Midhat Efendi, this paper argues that the craving for linguistic mastery in the late Ottoman cultural landscape was entwined with a performance of masculinity that enabled the homosocial imagination of an imperial identity. Registered in Ottoman Turkish fictional texts from the nineteenth century is an anxiety over multilingual potency, which —as an explicitly gendered phenomenon— communicates imperially suggestive sexual frustrations and ambitions. The trope of a multilingual charmer, in particular, helps eroticize imperial masculinity and redefine domination and conquest in the form of an intimacy. The creation of male-dominated intimacies in these narratives hinges on a demonstrated command of linguistic and cultural hybridity that is cashed in toward the fantasy of a geo-economically potent Ottoman Turkish imperial sovereignty. At the core of these representations, then, is an eroticized validation of the imperialist impulse to conquer and colonize. As such, fictions from the era instrumentalize heteronormative intimacies (founded in and through the mastery of multilingualism and multiculturalism) to facilitate the imagination of a global Ottoman Turkish imperial sovereignty.