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Turkish is spoken globally by approx. 70 million people as their native language; of them, 58 million live in Turkey (80 percent of the population) and more than 2 million in Germany (3 percent of the population). In addition, Turkish is closely related to the Azerbaijani and Turkmen languages (approx. 30 million and 7 million speakers respectively). Speakers of these three languages can communicate with one another without any problems.

In recent times, Turkish has gained in significance in the southeastern former Soviet republics and in Central Asia generally and is the most important language next to Russian and English. Together with those who speak it as a second language, it can be assumed that up to 200 million people in Europe and Asia can understand and speak Turkish. As a consequence, Turkish is ranked among the top 10 in the prevalence of languages worldwide.

Turkish is a language that contains a great number of foreign and loan words from other languages - in particular from the Arabic and lately from the French too. The root word of original Turkish words had been minimised as much as possible in the elitist Ottoman Empire in favour of loan words from the Persian (art, culture and lifestyle) and the Arabic (religion) and was considered as rustic. In 1930 still half of the words in the Turkish were of Arabic origin. As a result of targeted Turkish government efforts many foreign words could be replaced by early Turkish words or by Turkish neologisms. In this way, the number of Arabic words in the Turkish was rolled back to approx. 20 percent at present. The increased use of Turkish free of loan words led to broad sections of the population identifying with the Turkish and to a stronger national self-perception.