The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. The Turkic languages are traditionally considered to be part of the Altaic language family.

The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Anatolian Turkish, or Turkish proper.

The Turkic language family exhibits vowel harmony, and is typologically characterised by agglutination by means of suffixes, and a Subject Object Verb sentence order.

For centuries, the Turkic speaking peoples have migrated extensively and intermingled continuously, and their languages have been influenced mutually and through contact with the surrounding languages, especially the Iranian, Slavic, and Mongolic languages. This has obscured the historical developments within each language and/or language group, and as a result, there exist several systems to classify the Turkic languages. The genetic classification of the Turkic languages commonly followed today is the one by Samoilovich (mainly based on the development of *d). However, there are many details for which debate is still ongoing.

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