Language
Turkmen is the official language of Turkmenistan (per the 1992 Constitution), although Russian still is widely spoken in cities as a "language of inter-ethnic communication". Turkmen is spoken by 72% of the population, Russian 12%, Uzbek 9%, and other languages 7% ( Armenian (32,000), Bashkir (2,607), Belarusan (5,289), Brahui, Dargwa (1,599), Dungan, Erzya (3,488), Georgian (1,047), Karakalpak (2,542), Kazakh (88,000), Korean (3,493), Lak (1,590), Lezgi (10,400), Lithuanian (224), North Azerbaijani (33,000), Northern Uzbek (317,000), Osetin (1,887), Romanian (1,561), Russian (349,000), Tabassaran (177), Tajik (1,277), Tatar (40,434), Ukrainian (37,118), Western Farsi (8,000)).
Read more about this topic: Provinces Of Turkmenistan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)
“The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)