World Language Map

Where is Turkish spoken?

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language, spoken in Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus and 15 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Turkish is spoken

Turkish is spoken in 19 countries: Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus and 15 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Turkey93%78,231,135
Germany2.5%2,102,978
Bulgaria11%746,093
Cyprus23%303,722
Uzbekistan0.6%226,428
Netherlands1.2%213,269
Ukraine0.4%149,780
United Kingdom0.2%136,918
Greece1.2%125,533
Canada0.2%85,349
North Macedonia3.5%74,747
Romania0.1%23,593
AlbaniaNot givenNot given
ArmeniaNot givenNot given
AzerbaijanNot givenNot given
GeorgiaNot givenNot given
IranNot givenNot given
IraqNot givenNot given
SyriaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Turkish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Turkish.

How many people speak Turkish?

Wikidata gives about 82.2 million first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2021). It also lists about 5.9 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2021). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Turkish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Turkish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. Oghuz
  4. Nuclear Oghuz
  5. West Oghuz
  6. Turkish

Related languages

Other languages in the West Oghuz group:

More about Turkish

Codes: ISO 639-3 tur, Glottolog nucl1301. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Turkish

Where is Turkish spoken?

Turkish is spoken in Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus and 15 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 93% of the population of Turkey, which is about 78,231,135 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Turkish?

Wikidata gives about 82.2 million first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2021). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 5.9 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2021).

Which language family is Turkish in?

Glottolog places Turkish in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Oghuz, Nuclear Oghuz and West Oghuz.

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