Turkic language

Turkic
Geographic distribution:	From Eastern Europe to Western China and Siberia
Linguistic classification:	One of the world's primary language families
Proto-language:	Proto-Turkic
Subdivisions:	Common Turkic Oghur
ISO 639-5:
Glottolog:	turk1311
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages are a language family of at least thirty-five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning Western China to Mongolia, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.

Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 170 million people, and the total number of Turkic speakers, including second-language speakers, is over 200 million. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans, the native speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.

Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility among the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish, and Oghuz-influenced Crimean Tatar. Although methods of classification vary, the Turkic languages are usually considered to be divided equally into two branches: Oghur, the only surviving member of which is Chuvash, and Common Turkic, which includes all other Turkic languages including the Oghuz subbranch.