BEYOND TURKEY TURKISH LEARNERS & STUDENTS

Turkish Language Beyond Turkey

11/08/2021

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After the second half of the VIth century, the original culture of the Turkish tribes, which started to migrate to the north, south and to a significant extent to the west, was enriched with other cultures in interaction, but the Turkish spoken as the mother tongue was preserved and thus the language spread to very large parts of the continent.

According to the statistics of the United Nations in 1990, Turkish was spoken as a mother tongue by around 165 million people. Thus, our language has the largest (common) language character after Chinese, Hindi, English and Spanish. Assuming that the population increase is 1.5% on average, this number should now approach 180 million. Considering that Chinese is spoken by the Chinese minority in Southeast Asian countries excluding China and Taiwan, and Hindi is only spread in the Indian Subcontinent, it is among the languages spread over a wide geography in the world such as Turkish, Spanish and English. Of these, English is spoken as a mother tongue outside Great Britain, in the continent of North America, in the Republic of South Africa (by British people) and in Australia.

Spanish has spread outside of Spain in Central (including the southern United States) and South America (outside Brazil). On the other hand, Turkish is spoken as a mother tongue by Turks in Central and Western Europe, starting from the Pacific coasts of the Russian Federation, passing through Central Asia, Caucasus, Anatolia and Thrace, and also by Turks who have migrated to North America, although a small number of them. and South Asia (in varying intensities) we see it spreading all over the Northern Hemisphere. Source: Dialects of Turkish and the Geography of Their Spread.

Turkish-Speaking Countries (49)