Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Türkçe, Türk dili
Native speakers (estimated): 84 million
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 90 million
Where it’s spoken: Turkish is the national language of Turkey, where it is the first language of 90% of the population, and one of the two official languages of Cyprus alongside Greek. Turkish is recognized as a minority language in parts of Kosovo and North Macedonia, and many Turkish speakers live in other neighboring countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire, including Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Georgia, Syria and Iraq.
Emigration to Western Europe has also established a significant presence in many countries, especially in Germany, which is home to the largest community of the Turkish diaspora (estimated at 3 million). Turkish is the second most spoken native language in Germany, and Turks represent the largest ethnic minority group, including those born in Germany as well as ethnic Turks from other post-Ottoman countries. There are also large Turkish communities in France, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark, in roughly decreasing order by size.
The Turkish-American community in the United States has been estimated at up to one million, while estimates for size of the Turkish-Canadian and Turkish-Australian communities have exceeded 100,000 and 300,000 respectively. Naturally, as with immigrants from any country, cultural assimilation over generations means that many members of the diaspora speak Turkish with variable degrees of fluency.
Among world languages, Turkish ranks as the 12th or 14th most spoken first language, and the 20th or 21st most spoken overall, depending on whether the dialects of Arabic, Persian and Malay are counted as one language or several.
Language family: Turkic family, Oghuz branch. It is by far the most widely spoken Turkic language.
Related languages include: Other members of the Oghuz branch include Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and northwest Iran; Turkmen, the national language of Turkmenistan; and Qashqai, a minority language in south Iran. These all share some degree of mutual intelligibility.
The Turkic language family is believed to have originated in East Asia and then migrated west; today nearly 200 million people speak a Turkic language, with the largest number speaking Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Turkmen (in descending order, after Turkish). Of 35 total Turkic languages, many of the most endangered are spoken in Siberia and western China.
A longstanding linguistic theory previously held that Turkic languages formed part of a larger ‘Altaic’ family, relating it to Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, and even the Uralic group (Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian). However, the majority of linguists now believe there is insufficient evidence to support their common ancestry.