Turkmen (Туркмен, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. Turkmen is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 3,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000).
Turkmen is in the Turkic family. Sometimes grouped in larger, but disputed Altaic language family. It is a southern Turkic language, in the Turkmenian group, closely related to Crimean Turkish and Salar, and less closely related to Turkish and Azeri (Azerbaijani).
Turkmen is written using the Cyrillic alphabet or the Arabic alphabet, although in recent years, President Saparmurat Niyazov has decreed that Turkmen was now to be written in a specially modified and adapted version of the Roman alphabet.
Source: Ethnologue, SIL code: TCK
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