Turks of Turkey - Unreached People Group



Table of Contents

Introduction3

Background Information4

History4

Language8

Culture and Religion9

Economy12

Family and Living of Unreached People Group13

Status of the Church14

Proposed Strategy16

Strategy16

Choosing Strategic Location17

Selecting Receptive Peoples18

Employing Effective Methods19

Conclusion20

Turks of Turkey - Unreached People Group

Introduction

The Turkic peoples today are the approximately 150 million speakers of the 40 different forms of Turkic languages still in existence; a number of others are now extinct. This contemporary Turkic population includes modern Turkish speakers in Turkey and the surrounding countries, as well as speakers of languages of the Altai, Azeris, Karakalpak, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars, Turkmen, Tuvans, Uighur, Uzbeks, and Yakuts in Asia, plus many others residing in Europe. The adjective Turkish today is usually reserved for the people and language of the country of Turkey; the same is true for the noun form Turk, except when referring to ancient populations. None of these people are actually descendants of the ancient Central Asian people who first used the ethnonym Turk to refer to themselves; they disappeared in the 10th century. Most Turkic-language speaking people today are the descendants of groups who were either conquered by Turkic speakers or chose to adopt their language for other reasons. For example, contemporary Turks are primarily genetically related to Greeks and other groups from Asia Minor who adopted Turkic languages after the 10th century.

There probably has not been a time in history when all Turkic peoples were united under one ruler. The Gokturks, the first to use the name Turk for their empire, beginning in the sixth century, probably came closest to this feat, but even at that early date the Yakuts had already split from other Turkic peoples and moved to the northeast, away from the Gokturk political center in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia. Other Turkic speakers simply chose not to join with the Gokturks and later united more loosely as the Oghuz. The Turkic ancestors of the Uighur also remained outside this early alliance of Turkic speakers.

Background Information

History

Early Turkic Migrations into Europe

Among those considered the earliest Turkic peoples to migrate to Europe were the Bulgars, in the latter part of the fourth century, who entered Europe with the Huns. The Huns themselves were possibly a Turkic-speaking people as well, although they may have originally been Mongolic-speaking. The Avars, who created a European empire in the sixth century, were also possibly Turkic by origin.

Early Turkic Powers

Medieval Chinese texts relate that by the sixth century a nomadic Turkic people had established an empire in central Asia stretching from Mongolia to the Black Sea (thus including part of Europe). Known to the Chinese as Tujue and in other texts as Gokturks or Kokturks, they maintained a confederation of nomadic tribes from 552 to 745. At times during this period the Gokturks were under Chinese sovereignty.

After the breakup of the Gokturk Empire, largely as a result of internal conflict, other Turkic peoples rose to dominance in central Asia and Eastern Europe. Among them in the east were the Uygurs (or Uighurs, known to the Chinese as Huihe), who became dominant in ...