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)).
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)