Turkic Languages
History, Still LivingTwo Hundred Million People
Roughly 200 million people speak a Turkic language, across more than 35 living languages. Turkish is the largest of them by a wide margin — and still only about 38% of the total. The other 62% speak Azerbaijani Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tatar, Sakha and dozens more. It is a family, not a country.
Where They Actually Live
In six sovereign countries a Turkic language is the language of government: Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But that is the small number. Turkic speakers also live in China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and the Balkans. Tashkent, Almaty, Baku, Tabriz and Tehran are all cities of millions where a Turkic language is spoken every day. In Tabriz, Azerbaijani Turkish is the language of the home and the street; more than a million people speak it in Tehran alone. In Cyprus, Turkish is co-official under the 1960 constitution. Bulgaria's 2021 census recorded over half a million people giving Turkish as their mother tongue. This is not one block on a map — it is separate places, far apart.
Three Branches
The family divides into three main branches. Oghuz in the west holds Turkish, Azerbaijani Turkish, Turkmen and Gagauz. Kipchak in the northwest holds Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar and Bashkir — its speakers are largely European, which is why calling the split simply 'west and east' gets it wrong. Karluk in the east holds Uzbek and Uyghur. Further out sit Sakha in Siberia, and Chuvash on a branch of its own that separated earliest of all.
What the Alphabet Changes Cost
In the Soviet Turkic republics the writing system was changed twice in about twelve years: from the Arabic script to a shared Latin alphabet around 1929, then to Cyrillic in 1940. The Latin alphabet had been common across the republics. The Cyrillic that replaced it was not — each republic received a different version. The practical effect was severe: a book printed in Baku in 1928 was unreadable to a child there by 1945. After independence in 1991 some states returned to Latin and some did not. Azerbaijan completed the switch in 2001; Uzbekistan has extended its transition repeatedly; Kazakhstan announced a Latin alphabet and then postponed it; Kyrgyzstan kept Cyrillic. A common Turkic alphabet was recommended in 2024, but no country has enacted it.
The Part That Did Not Change
Almost everything drifted. The counting did not. Bir, iki, üç, dört, beş in Türkiye. Bir, iki, üç, dörd, beş in Azerbaijan. Bir, ikki, uch, to'rt, besh in Uzbek. Bir, eki, üş, tört, bes in Kazakh. Bir, ikki, üch, töt, bäsh in Uyghur. Biir, ikki, üs, tüört, bies in Sakha, five thousand kilometres away in Siberia. A speaker in Istanbul can follow a Uyghur in China counting to five. Chuvash is the exception that proves the rule — its branch split earliest and its numbers genuinely diverge.
What Exists Today
Five of the six states meet as the Organization of Turkic States, founded in 2009 as the Turkic Council and renamed in 2021: Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Turkmenistan attends as an observer rather than a member, because of the permanent neutrality the UN General Assembly recognised in 1995. Hungary is also an observer, despite Hungarian not being a Turkic language at all. A Turkish citizen can already travel to all four other members without a visa — though Azerbaijan's visa-free entry applies by air via Baku, with land and sea crossings still requiring a consular visa. None of this makes one nation. It makes one family of languages, still talking.
Key Dates to Remember
- c. 1929 — Soviet Turkic republics adopt a shared Latin alphabet
- 1940 — Cyrillic replaces it — a different version in each republic
- 1960 — Turkish becomes co-official in Cyprus
- 1991 — Independence; some states return to the Latin script
- 2009 — Turkic Council founded — later the Organization of Turkic States
- 2021 — Renamed the Organization of Turkic States