Turkish

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This page reports contributions that have been received for the Ethnologue description of this language. Please read the community norms page for more information on contributing.

Canada

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Sun, 2022-12-25 10:09
Regarding: 
Population
ISO 639-3: 
tur
Editorial Action

We will update the Ethnologue database with the results of the 2021 Canadian census for L2 speaker populations, having already completed the L1 populations in Oct. 2022.

Mutual intelligibility among Turkic languages

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Thu, 2022-03-17 15:40
Regarding: 
Other Comments
ISO 639-3: 
tur

So there are various, and sometimes contradicting, claims. A big issue is the asymmetric intelligibility: Turkey is now the second biggest TV exporter in the world ( https://haymillian.com/turkish-delight-how-turkey-has-become-the-second-... ) so Turkic speakers from all around the world watch Turkish series and this has made the Istanbul accent more understandable. At the same time, Turkish power is growing and more and more Turkic speakers do business with Turkey, visit Turkey for tourism, go there to study or work, etc. So a young educated Azeri, Iraqi Turkmen, or Uzbek most likely understand Istanbul Turkish. The opposite may not be true.

Editorial Action

We will add lexical similarity percentage information for many Turkic languages, for inclusion in the next edition of the Ethnologue.

Turkish speakers in the US

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Sun, 2022-03-13 15:40
Regarding: 
Population
ISO 639-3: 
tur

212,489 Turkish Americans according to the 2019 ACS Estimates: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=turkish&tid=ACSSPP1Y2019.S0201

64.1% speaking a language at home other than English

So at least 136k Turkish speakers.

That's a lower bound as there are also Cypriot-Turks, Bulgarian Turks, etc. in the US. And some Turkish Americans speak English at home but can still speak Turkish.

Editorial Action

We will update the L1 speaker population for Turkish [tur] in the United States, for inclusion in the next edition of the Ethnologue.

Turkish speakers in Sweden

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Sun, 2022-03-13 15:28
Regarding: 
Population
ISO 639-3: 
tur

"Turkish heritage speakers in Sweden constitute a sizeable minority, but are far from the largest immigrant minority in the country. As Swedish authorities are prohibited from collecting census data regarding ethnicity and speakers of a certain language, the exact number of Turkish speakers is unknown; our own estimate, based on Statistics Sweden (2017), is that there are ca 100,000 Turkish speakers, making up around 1% of Sweden’s 10-million population.2"

Ute Bohnacker (2022) Turkish heritage families in Sweden: language practices and family language policy, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2022.2041646 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2022.2041646

Editorial Action

We will update the L1 speaker population for Turkish [tur] in Sweden, for inclusion in the next edition of the Ethnologue.

Remove Turkish from Afghanistan

david12go, Sat, 2022-02-26 07:11
Regarding: 
Other Comments
Country: 
Afghanistan
ISO 639-3: 
tur

Turkish is not a language native to Afghanistan. There are native speakers of dozens of other languages in Afghanistan, but those languages are not listed for Afghanistan - Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French, and so forth. On what basis was Turkish chosen to be listed?

Editorial Action

We will remove the entry for Turkish [tur] in Afghanistan.  This change will be made in the next edition of the Ethnologue.