Turkicspeaking

Turkic-speaking refers to people who use any of the Turkic languages, or to studies and aspects related to the Turkic language family. The Turkic languages form a widely distributed language group spoken by roughly 180 to 200 million people across Eurasia, from Turkey and Azerbaijan in the west to Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga region, and parts of China, with diaspora communities in Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. The largest individual languages include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Tatar; smaller but notable languages include Chuvash, Yakut (Sakha), Urum, and various minority tongues.

Linguistically, Turkic languages are generally agglutinative, relying on suffixation to encode grammatical relations, and many exhibit vowel harmony. The usual basic word order is subject–object–verb, though there is variation across the family. The Turkic languages are commonly divided into subgroups such as Oghur and Karluk, with further branching across Central Asia, the Volga region, and Siberia.

Historically, Turkic-speaking peoples trace their roots to the East Eurasian steppes, with early attestations appearing in inscriptions such as the Orkhon in the 8th century. Over time, Turkic-speaking communities expanded and diversified through migrations, trade networks, and the establishment of empires, shaping a broad linguistic and cultural sphere.

In contemporary contexts, Turkic-speaking communities face issues typical of multilingual settings, including language policy, script reform (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic in various periods), degree of official status for national or regional languages, and efforts to maintain language transmission amid dominant languages and urbanization.