Who Are The Turks?
The simplest questions can be the most difficult to answer. The Turks are obviously a people separate from other peoples, but a people can be defined in many ways — language, religion, cultural traits, citizenship, loyalty to a ruling house or many other feelings of kinship. The Turks of today are citizens of the Turkish Republic. The name Turk is also used to describe the people in Turkey who share the distinctive Turkish culture, especially the Turkish language, which all Turkish citizens do not share, no more than all Americans speak English. Or a Turk can also mean a member of the great linguistic and cultural family of the Turks, a family that stretches from China to Europe, bound together by language and history. The best way to define the Turks may be to consider which people make up the Turks of Turkey and how they defined themselves politically, first as subjects of the Ottoman Empire, then as citizens of the Turkish Republic. The original speakers of the Turkish language liv
