World Turkic Language Family Day Date in the current year: December 15, 2025

The Turkic language family comprises over 35 languages spoken by Turkic peoples residing in Western, Central, Eastern, and Northern Asia, as well as parts of Europe. The languages likely originated in East Asia (present-day Mongolia and northwestern China) and spread from there to Central Asia and beyond, reaching as far as the Mediterranean. The diversity of alphabets used by Turkic languages illustrates the extent of their spread: some use the Cyrillic alphabet, some use the Latin alphabet, some use the Perso-Arabic alphabet, and the Krymchak language used Hebrew script before the Soviet era.

Turkic languages share a common ancestral language often referred to as Proto-Turkic. This language was spoken several millennia ago and forms the basis for many shared grammatical structures and core vocabulary. A defining feature of Turkic languages is extensive agglutination, for example. This means that words are formed by adding a series of morphemes to a root, each expressing a specific grammatical function such as tense, mood, case, or possession.

Another prominent characteristic of Turkic languages is vowel harmony. It is a process in which the vowels within a word change to become phonetically compatible with each other. This affects affixes and contributes to the melodic quality of the language. Turkic languages typically lack grammatical gender and often rely on word order and affixes rather than separate words to indicate grammatical relationships.

Around 200 million people speak Turkic languages worldwide. The top ten Turkic languages by number of speakers are Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uyghur, Turkmen, Tatar, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, and Chuvash. Native Turkish speakers account for approximately 38% of all Turkic language speakers.

World Turkic Language Family Day was established during the 43rd session of the UNESCO General Conference held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, from October 30 to November 13, 2025. It was initiated by five Turkic-speaking nations: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

December 15 was chosen as the date to commemorate the deciphering of the Orkhon inscriptions by Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. These inscriptions are eighth-century Turkic memorial steles discovered in Mongolia that recount the legendary origins of the Turks and the accomplishments of the Second Turkic Khaganate. They are written in two languages, Middle Chinese and Old Turkic, using the Old Turkic runic alphabet.

A Russian expedition led by Nikolai Yadrintsev discovered the steles in 1889. Vasily Radlov (also known as Wilhelm Radloff), a German-Russian linguist and the founder of Turkology, published the Orkhon inscriptions but did not decipher them. Vilhelm Thomsen was the first to successfully decipher the inscriptions in 1893, providing a foundation for translating other Turkic writings.

The main goals of World Turkic Language Family Day are to celebrate the diversity of Turkic languages, recognize the shared heritage of Turkic peoples, promote the preservation of vulnerable and endangered Turkic languages, and encourage cooperation between Turkic-speaking states and UNESCO.