Language
Turkmen 72%, Russian 12%, Uzbek 9%, other 7%. Nearly 22% of the non-Russian population indicated in the 1995 census that they spoke Russian fluently. According to Ethnologue, up to 50% claim "good knowledge" of Russian. Other languages includes Balochi, which was spoken by 36,600 people in 1995, as well as Persian and Pashto.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Turkmenistan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“While you are divided from us by geographical lines, which are imaginary, and by a language which is not the same, you have not come to an alien people or land. In the realm of the heart, in the domain of the mind, there are no geographical lines dividing the nations.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)