The Turkish Phenomenon in the World

Even China and India cannot reach this rate in the world. According to Professor Faruk Şen in his recently published book, 1 out of every 10 Turks living in the world lives outside of Turkey.

It is stated that Turks live in 132 countries in the world and 6 million 800 thousand people of Turkish origin live outside the borders of their own country. It is emphasized that the country with the highest number of immigrants living outside the borders of its own country in the world is China, with a population of 1.3 billion, and that China has 55 million people living abroad, followed by India. Among the people living outside their own country in the world, the Chinese are in the first place, the Indians are in the second place, and the Turks are in the third place. Source: Faruk Sen. The Turkish Case in the World. Positive Release. 11/2015

The Turkish phenomenon in the world has not received enough attention in Turkey. Unfortunately, the studies on the Turkish world, the interest shown in the kinship communities, and the fact that it has become a serious phenomenon with the departure of Turks abroad since 1961 have unfortunately been ignored.

While Turkey gave the right to vote to Turkish citizens living abroad for the first time in the 2015 elections, it did not put the right to be elected on the agenda again. Thus, while half of the right to vote and be elected was implemented, the other half was not implemented. With a population of 1.3 billion, the largest number of immigrants living outside its own country borders in the world is China. China has 55 million people living abroad, which corresponds to 0.3% of the Chinese population.

India follows China. 35 million of India’s population of 1.1 billion lives abroad and this rate constitutes 0.3% of the country’s population. Turkey is the third country behind India. A population of 6 million 800 thousand of Turkey’s 78 million people live outside its own country borders, which corresponds to 9% of our own population. Compared to China and India, this rate is almost thirty times higher.

According to the statistics of the United Nations in 1990, Turkish was spoken as a mother tongue by around 165 million people. Thus, our language has the largest (common) language character after Chinese, Hindi, English and Spanish. Assuming that the population increase is 1.5% on average, this number should now approach 180 million. Considering that Chinese is spoken by the Chinese minority in Southeast Asian countries excluding China and Taiwan, and Hindi is only spread in the Indian Subcontinent, it is among the languages ​​spread over a wide geography in the world such as Turkish, Spanish and English. Of these, English is spoken as a mother tongue outside Great Britain, in the continent of North America, in the Republic of South Africa (by those of English descent) and in Australia.

Spanish has spread outside of Spain in Central (including the southern United States) and South America (outside Brazil). On the other hand, Turkish is spoken as a mother tongue by Turks in Central and Western Europe, starting from the Pacific coasts of the Russian Federation, passing through Central Asia, Caucasus, Anatolia and Thrace, and also by Turks who have migrated to North America, although a small number of them and South Asia (in varying intensities) we see it spreading all over the Northern Hemisphere.

Source: Dialects of Turkish and the Geography of Their Spread.