Turkic | |
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Geographic distribution: | Eastern Europe Caucasus West Asia Central Asia North Asia (Siberia) East Asia (Far East) |
Linguistic classification: | One of the world's primary language families |
Proto-language: | Proto-Turkic |
Subdivisions: | |
ISO 639-5: | trk |
Distribution of Turkic languages |
The Turkic languages are a language family of some thirty languages. They are spoken by Turkic peoples across an area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western and Northern China. Traditionally people think that they are part of the Altaic language family.[1]
Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people as a native language;[2] and the total number of Turkic speakers is about 230 million, including speakers as a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is the Turkish language, or Anatolian Turkish. The speakers of this language are about 40% of all Turkic speakers.[1]