How many people in the WORLD speaks Turkish?

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Totally Blunt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages

According to wikipedia, some 200 million people speak the Turkic languages.

Chinese is the most used language, but you have to take into account that spoken Chinese differs from region to region, i.e. there are dialects which widely vary phonetically. But written Chinese is standard. It just shows how strong a bureaucracy the Chinese have had for thousands of years, I think.

So, it's hard to determine how many people speak a certain language.

..Tolia..

i dont know, but its not an issue to me

I ll learn to speak fluently some day! (i am trying, believe me :) )

even if 10 people in the world speak it!

:)

I-M-B

I agree with Tanju...The Turkish from Anatolia is probably spoken by 75 millions + about 5 millions Turks living in Western countries ( Europe,North America,Australia ) + about 5 millions originally turkish people who are citizens of neighbour countries ( Bulgaria, Greece,Iraq,Macedonia,etc...)

So I think the Anatolian Turkish is spoken by about 85 million people.
If you add the other turkish languages, the number can probably reach 300 millions, I think...

Leprechaun

I can't make a scientific comment here,but i can tell my observations.

I can understand and communicate with the people in Turkey,some Turkish people in some European areas (mostly in Balkans) and Azeris.

The other,Turkmens,Kazakhs,Uzbek's i cannot understand.The sounds are close but you can't understand them.Maybe these languages are very close relatives but, it is not like English language spoken widely or Spanish.So you can't say hundreds of millions people speak the same Turkish language.

Earthling

Around 75 million people speak Turkish as a native language and it ranks 15 among most widely spoken languages.

Trotsky vs Kerensky- ÐÐµÐºIÐ¾!

I'd count the Turks from Central Asia because my dad travels a lot to Central Asia, he admits that in some countries he can't understand what they're saying but in most cases he can communicate with them in Turkish. Also it is interesting that the Gagavuz Turks in Moldova who are Christian, and not very many in number speak a Turkish which is very close to the Turkish we speak in Turkey.

As for the Azeris, you can perfectly, flawlessly understand what they're saying. I'd definitely count that as Turkish.

So I'll give it a 200 million as well.

Frank B

The number is ~65â€“73 million native speakers plus several million immigrants (~10 million) in Western Europe. Moreover, 40% of those that can speak one of the Turkic languages (>30 different ones) can also speak Turkish.

Here you can also have a look on their geographic distribution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MapOfTurkishSpeakers.png

Fugitiveangel

It should be around 200.000.000 more or less.

anlarm

It depends on what you mean by "Turkish". The Turkish as we know is spoken in Turkey and also by Turkish Cypriots, Bulgarian Turks and Turks in western Thrace. There are different accents of course (some people laugh at the Cypriot accent disregarding the accents in Turkey).
Our relatives in Asia speak what they call "Turkish" or "Uzbek", "Azeri", "Kazak" etc. They are all Turkic languages and some people in Turkey would like to believe that they are all speaking Turkish. I was awakened to the truth by my linguistics professor who was from Azerbaijan. She said she could speak English, Russian, German, Azeri, and some Turkish. She insisted it was another language. Who was I to argue with her.
Azeri Turkish is the closest to ours, while it is almost impossible to understand the other central Asian Turkic languages.
So the answer to your question should be: around 70-75 million.
edit: four people got hurt by what I said. hard to understand their concern when I just gave some facts and figures.