The Turkic languages form a vast and important linguistic group, spoken across a wide geographical area, with Turcia (see Map) at its heart. Turkic is one of the largest language families in the world in terms of territorial extension.

Delineated counterclockwise, present-day Turcia extends from the southwest, including Turkey and its neighbors, to the southeast into Central Asia, and farther into China. From here, it stretches to the northeast, through southern and northern Siberia, up to the Arctic Ocean, and finally to the northwest, across western Siberia and eastern Europe, extending to northwestern Europe.

Regions where Turkic languages are spoken include Anatolia, the Balkans, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia, the vast areas once known as West and East Turkistan, China (primarily Xinjiang), and parts of the Russian Federation, including southern, northern, and western Siberia, the Volga-Ural region, the southern Russian steppes, and the Caucasus. Since the 1960s, immigrant groups in northwestern Europe, particularly Germany, have added to the global presence of these languages.

Historically, the Turkic-speaking world also included compact areas in the Ponto-Caspian steppes, Crimea, and the Balkans, where substantial numbers of speakers still reside. The Ponto-Caspian steppes stretch from the northern shores of the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, extending from Moldova and eastern Ukraine across several Russian districts to western Kazakhstan. Geographically, the boundary between Europe and Asia runs from the Caucasus Mountains to the Black Sea, and from the Ural Mountains southward to the Ural River and the Caspian Sea.

The Turkic language family currently includes more than a dozen major languages, such as Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Uyghur, Tuvan, and Yakut. While mutual intelligibility across the entire family is limited, there is often a higher level of mutual understanding between neighboring speaker groups.