Demographics of Turkey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2007) |
| Demographics of the Republic of Turkey | |
|---|---|
 1961-2007 |
|
| Size: | 70,586,256[1] (2007 est.) |
| Growth: | 1.04% (2007 est.) |
| Birth: | 16.62 births/1,000 population (2006 est.) |
| Death: | 5.97 deaths/1,000 population (2006 est.) |
| Life expectancy: | 72.62 years (2006 est.) |
| Life expectancy(m): | 70.18 years |
| Life expectancy(f): | 75.18 years |
| Fertility: | 1.92 children born/woman (2006 est.) |
| Age Structure: | |
| 0-14 years: | 25.5% (male 9,133,226; female 8,800,070) |
| 15-64 years: | 67.7% (male 24,218,277; female 23,456,761) |
| 65-0ver years: | 6.8% (male 2,198,073; female 2,607,551) (2006 est.) |
| Sex Ratio: | |
| At birth: | 1.05 male(s)/female (2006 est.) |
| Under 15 years: | 1.04 male(s)/female |
| 15-64 years: | 1.03 male(s)/female |
| Nationality: | |
| nationality: | noun: Turk(s) adjective: Turkish |
| Major ethnic: | Turks |
| Minor ethnic: | Abkhazians, Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Azeris, Bosniaks, Chechens, Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Hamshenis, Jews, Kabardin, Kurds, Laz, Levantines, Ossetians, Pomaks, Roma and Zazas.[2] |
| Language: | |
| Official: | Turkish |
| Spoken: | Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Azeri, Kabardiann |
As of 2007, the population of Turkey stood at 70.5 million[1] with a growth rate of 1.04% per annum.[3] The Turkish population is relatively young with 25.5% falling within the 0-15 age bracket.[4] There are more than 1 million people of non-Turkish descent, about 1 million of whom are foreign residents.
Contents |
[edit] East-West migration
Modern Turkey spans bustling cosmopolitan centers, pastoral farming villages, barren wastelands, peaceful Black Sea, Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines, and steep mountain regions. More than half of Turkey's population lives in urban areas that juxtapose typically Western lifestyles alongside mosques and markets.
[edit] Immigration
[edit] Ottoman Empire period
Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire welcomed altogether hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Spanish and Portuguese Jews after 1492; political and confessional refugees from Central Europe: Russian schismatics in 17-18th centuries, Nekrasov Cossacks (after rebellion), Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries after 1848, Jews escaping the pogroms and later the Shoah, White Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russian and other socialist or communist revolutionaries, Trotskyists fleeing the USSR in the 1930s;
[edit] Republican Period (since 1923)
People moving into Turkey during the Republican Period include Muslim refugees (Muhajir) from formerly Muslim-dominated regions invaded by Christian States, like Crimean Tatars, Circassians and Chechens from the Russian Empire, Algerian followers of Abd-el-Kader, Mahdists from Sudan, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other Central Asian Turkic-speaking peoples fleeing the USSR and later the war-torn Afghanistan, Balkan Muslims, either Turkish-speaking or Bosniaks, Pomaks, Albanians, Greek Muslims etc., fleeing either the new Christian states or later the Communist regimes, in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria for instance.
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, there has been a considerable influx of Eastern Europeans to Turkey, particularly from the former USSR. Some of them have chosen to become Turkish citizens, while others continue to live and work in Turkey as foreigners. The district of Laleli in Istanbul is known with the nickname "Little Russia" due to its large Russian community and the numerous street signs, restaurant names, shop names and hotel names in the Russian language.
[edit] Property acquisition since the 1990s
After a change in the Turkish constitution gave foreigners the right to purchase real estate in the country in 2005, a large number of people, mostly pensioners from Western Europe, bought houses in the popular tourist destinations and moved to Turkey. The largest groups, according to the volume of purchases, are the Germans, British, Dutch, Irish, Greeks, Italians and Americans.
[edit] Religion
Nominally, 99.8% of the Turkish population is Muslim, mostly Sunni, and 0.2% is Other, mostly Christians and Jews [5]. Some 15 to 25 million, are Alevi and Shia[citation needed].[6] Other religions represented are: Christianity (Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Syriac Orthodox), Judaism and Yezidism.[citation needed] The Eurobarometer Poll 2005 reported that in a poll 95% of Turkish citizens answered that "they believe there is a God", while 1% responded that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force".[7] In a Pew Research Center survey, 69% of Turkey's Muslims said that "religion is very important in their lives".[8]
There is a strong tradition of secularism in Turkey. Even though the state has no official religion nor promotes any, it actively monitors the area between the religions. The constitution recognises freedom of religion for individuals whereas religious communities are placed under the protection of the state, but the constitution explicitly states that they cannot become involved in the political process (by forming a religious party for instance) or establish faith-based schools. No party can claim that it represents a form of religious belief; nevertheless, religious sensibilities are generally represented through conservative parties. Turkey prohibits by law the wearing of religious headcover and theo-political symbolic garments for both genders in government buildings, schools, and universities;[9] a law upheld by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights as "legitimate" in Leyla Şahin v. Turkey on November 10, 2005.[10]
[edit] Ethnic groups
The Turkish people, are a nation (millet) in the meaning of an ethnos (Halk in Turkish), defined more by a sense of sharing a common Turkish culture and having a Turkish mother tongue, than by citizenship, religion or by being subjects to any particular country.
The word Turk or Turkish also has a wider meaning in an historical context because, at times, especially in the past, it has been used to refer to all Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire irrespective of their ethnicity.[11] The question of ethnicity in modern Turkey is a highly debated and difficult issue. Figures published in several different sources prove this difficulty by varying greatly.
It is necessary to take into account all these difficulties and be cautious while evaluating the ethnic groups. A possible list of ethnic groups living in Turkey could be as follows (based on the classification of P.A. Andrews (1), however this book is more like a review and depends on other people's publications):
- Turkic-speaking peoples: Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kumyks, Yörüks, Uzbeks, Crimean Tatars, Azeris, Balkars, Uyghurs, Karachays.
- Indo-European-speaking peoples: Kurds, Zazas, Armenians, Hamshenis, Greeks, Pontic Greeks and Greek Muslims
- Semitic-speaking peoples: Arabs, Jews, and Assyrians
- Caucasian-speaking peoples: Georgians, Lazs, Circassians, and Chechens
- Other Muslim groups originally from the Balkans (Bulgarians, Albanians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians and Bosniaks): These people migrated to Anatolia during the Ottoman Era and have been assumed to accept Turkish-Muslim identity.
- Cossacks in Turkey (mostly left Turkey by 1962)
- Others: There are small groups and individuals from all over the world living in Turkey, either remnants of past migrations (there is for instance a village near the Bosphorus named Adampol in Polish, Polonezköy, "the Polish village", in Turkish) or witnesses of contemporary mass migrations towards the European Union and its periphery (there are also illegal migrants camps with thousands of Africans and others intercepted while trying to embark, or swimming from the wreckage of overpopulated small boats, for the Greek or Italian shores).
Proving the difficulty of classifying the ethnicities of the population of Turkey, there are as many classifications as the number of scientific attempts to make these classifications. Turkey is not unique in this respect; many other European countries (e.g. France, Germany) also bear a great ethnic diversity that defies classification. The immense variation observed in the published figures for the percentages of Turkish people living in Turkey (ranging from 75 to 97%) simply reflects differences in the methods used to classify the ethnicities, with a main factor being the choice of whether to exclude or include Kurds. Complicating the matter even more is the fact that the last official and country-wide classification of spoken languages (which do not exactly coincide with ethnic groups) in Turkey was performed in 1965; many of the figures published after that time are very loose estimates.
- See also: Peoples of the Caucasus in Turkey
[edit] Turkic
- See also: Turkic peoples
Some ambiguity exists with reference to Turkic ethnicity. The Oğuz people (western branch of the wider Turkic peoples) began arriving in the region as mercenary soldiers under the Abassid caliphs over a thousand years ago. Their origins were in the Altay region (across the boundary of modern day Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and China). The features of these original Turks were mainly mongoloid or a mongoloid-caucasoid mixture and there is substantial evidence that the Native American peoples share the same roots. The Oghuz became substantially mixed during their westward migrations, with Persians, Armenians and other Caucasian peoples. The Ottomans later mixed heavily with the Byzantine Greeks. Thus, the Asiatic Turkic type is only a minority in modern-day Turkey. The cultural traits they brought with them were based on a nomadic lifestyle and included archery, horsemanship, falconry, wrestling, and such foods as the kebab and yoghurt. They also of course gave Turkey its language which can be broadly understood across the Turkic lands of central Asia and beyond.
The Oğuz people, which once constituted the majority of the reigning fraction of Turkic people in Anatolia, gained political, cultural and military dominance in the region but remained for centuries only a small part of the population, demographically speaking. Anatolia, which was formerly a part of many civilizations like the Hittites and the Byzantine Empire, was (and still is) an ethnically very mixed region where the last official religion was Greek Orthodox, and where there are many adherents of other Christian churches or "deviant" Christian or syncretist movements, as well as Jews.
The Turkic migrations were not only westwards, but also south into India, China and Afghanistan, north into Siberia and east into Korea (although some sources contest this). The wider Turkic peoples therefore represent one of the most widely distributed ethnicities in the world. Other non-Ottoman Turkic tribes are present in Turkey and include the Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kumyks, Uzbeks, Tatars, Azeris, Balkars, Uyghurs, Karachays, Nogai and Kyrgyz, mostly the result of modern migrations from the former Soviet Union.
[edit] Kurds
Although the Turks were largely successful in their cultural domination and assimilation of many subject peoples in their empire, the Kurdish identity remains the strongest of the many minorities in modern Turkey. This is perhaps due to the mountainous terrain of the south-east of the country, where represent a majority in the Kurdistan region of South East Turkey. They inhabit all major towns and cities across Turkey.
No accurate up-to-date figures are available for the Kurdish population, because the Turkish government has outlawed ethnic or racial censuses. Though some estimates such as the CIA World Factbook place their population at approximately 20%.[12] Another estimate, according to [[Ibrahim Sirkeci], an ethnic Turk, in his book The Environment of Insecurity in Turkey and the Emigration of Turkish Kurds to Germany, based on the 1990 Turkish Census and 1993 Turkish Demographic Health Survey, is 17.8%.[13]
The Minority Rights Group report of 1985 (by Martin Short and Anthony McDermott) gave an estimate of 19% Kurds in the population of Turkey in 1980, i.e. 8,455,000 out of 44,500,000, with the preceding comment 'Nothing, apart from the actual 'borders' of Kurdistan, generates as much heat in the Kurdish question as the estimate of the Kurdish population. Kurdish nationalists are tempted to exaggerate it, and governments of the region to understate it. In Turkey only those Kurds who do not speak Turkish are officially counted for census purposes as Kurds, yielding a very low figure.'. In Turkey: A Country Study, a 1995 on line publication of the U.S. Library of Congress, there is a whole chapter about Kurds in Turkey where it is stated that 'Turkey's censuses do not list Kurds as a separate ethnic group. Consequently, there are no reliable data on their total numbers. In 1995 estimates of the number of Kurds in Turkey ranged from 6 million to 12 million.' out of 61.2 million, which means from 10 to 20%. And a higher percentage (between 20 and 25%) can be found elsewhere in various sources. Kurdish national identity is far from being limited to the Kurmanji language community, as many Kurds whose parents migrated towards Istanbul or other big non Kurdish cities mostly speak Turkish, which is one of the languages used by the Kurdish nationalist publications. Also, there is a considerable Circassian (a Turkic ethnic group) population which is estimated to constitute 5% of population, or over 3 millions
[edit] Lazs
 |
Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
[edit] Others (Christians)
An exception is the Hamshenis, Armenians converted to Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, still keep some pre-Islamic traditions and retain the use of two distinct Armenian dialects, but reject Armenian ethnic or national identity whereas their Laz neighbours name them "Ermeni," the Turkish term for Armenians. There are also some Pontic Greek Muslims.
Among the Black Sea Turkish intellectuals, there have been in the last few years a revival of interest for the forgotten ethnic and religious identities of their ancestors. The research by Özhan Öztürk, but also the books of Ömer Asan and Selma Koçiva are good illustrations at this trend.
There have also been through the XIXth and XXth centuries, and still nowadays, rumors of the existence, mostly in rural and small town areas, of large populations of Crypto-Christians and Crypto-Jews, notably among the Dönme, descendants of Sabbatai Zevi's followers who had to convert en masse following Zevi's example.
Islam spread slowly over many generations either through voluntary or forced conversions; many poor families chose to become Muslims in order to escape a special tax levied on conquered millet peoples or for reasons of upward mobility. Another common motivation was to escape the devşirme system for recruiting Janissaries to the Ottoman forces, and the similar institution of using dhimmi children to serve as odalisques or köçeks in the Ottoman harems or as tellaks in the hammams. Conversion to Islam was usually accompanied by the adoption of Ottoman-Turkish language and identity and eventual acceptance into the mainstream population, because conversion was generally irreversible and resulted in ostracism from the original ethnic group.
[edit] Literacy
- See also: Education in Turkey
Education is compulsory and free from ages 6 to 15. The literacy rate is 95.3% for men and 79.6% for women, for an overall average of 87.4%.[14].
[edit] Life expectancy
According to statistics released by the government in 2005, life expectancy stands at 68.9 years for men and 73.8 years for women, for an overall average of 71.3 years for the populace as a whole.
[edit] Languages spoken
Turkish (official), Kurdish, Circassian, Zazaki, Arabic, Azeri, Armenian (and its Hamshin dialects), Laz, Georgian (and its dialect Ajar), Greek and Pontic Greek, Bosnian and several others. According to the CIA World Factbook, 20% of Turkey's population considers Kurdish to be their mother tongue.
| language | mother tongue |
only language spoken |
second language best spoken |
| Abaza | 4,563 | 280 | 7,556 |
| Albanian | 12,832 | 1,075 | 39,613 |
| Arabic | 365,340 | 189,134 | 167,924 |
| Armenian | 33,094 | 1,022 | 22,260 |
| Bosnian | 17,627 | 2,345 | 34,892 |
| Bulgarian | 4,088 | 350 | 46,742 |
| Bulgarian - Pomak | 23,138 | 2,776 | 34,234 |
| Circassian | 58,339 | 6,409 | 48,621 |
| Croatian | 45 | 1 | 1,585 |
| Czech | 168 | 25 | 76 |
| Dutch (Flemish) | 366 | 23 | 219 |
| English | 27,841 | 21,766 | 139,867 |
| French | 3,302 | 398 | 96,879 |
| Georgian | 34,330 | 4,042 | 44,934 |
| German | 4,901 | 790 | 35,704 |
| Greek | 48,096 | 3,203 | 78,941 |
| Italian | 2,926 | 267 | 3,861 |
| Kurdish (Kurmanji) | 2,219,502 | 1,323,690 | 429,168 |
| Judæo-Spanish | 9,981 | 283 | 3,510 |
| Laz | 26,007 | 3,943 | 55,158 |
| Persian | 948 | 72 | 2,103 |
| Polish | 110 | 20 | 377 |
| Portuguese | 52 | 5 | 3,233 |
| Romanian | 406 | 53 | 6,909 |
| Russian | 1,088 | 284 | 4,530 |
| Serbian | 6,599 | 776 | 58,802 |
| Spanish | 2,791 | 138 | 4,297 |
| Turkish | 28,289,680 | 26,925,649 | 1,387,139 |
| Zaza | 150,644 | 92,288 | 20,413 |
| Source[15] | |||
[edit] Minorities
Modern Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal as secular (Laiklik, Turkish adaptation of French Laïcité), i.e. without a state religion, or separate ethnic divisions/ identities.
The concept of "minorities" has only been accepted by the Republic of Turkey as defined by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1924 and thence strictly limited to Greeks, Jews and Armenians, only on religious matters, excluding from the scope of the concept the ethnic identities of these minorities as of others such as the Kurds who make up 20% of the country; others include Christian Assyrians of various denominations, Alevis and all the others. In this matter, Turkish governments of all political creeds acted just like their Greek counterparts who have always refused to recognize any other minority than the Muslims, as defined by the same treaty of 1924, thus not allowing any manifestation of Turkish or Pomak identity, nor for Macedonians, Albanians or Vlachs.
There are many reports from sources like (Human Rights Watch, European Parliament, European Commission, national parliaments in EU member states, Amnesty International etc.) on persistent yet declining discriminations.
Certain current trends are:
- The religious affiliation is compulsory on the ID cards
- Turkish imams get salaries from the state (like Greek Orthodox clerics in Greece), whereas Turkish Alevi as well as non-Orthodox and non-Armenian clerics are not paid
- Imams can be trained freely at the numerous religious schools and theology departments of universities throughout the country; minority religions can not re-open schools for training of their local clerics due to legislation and international treaties dating back to the end of Turkish War of Independence. The closing of the Theological School of Halki is a sore bone of contention between Turkey and the Eastern Orthodox world.;
- The Turkish state sends out paid imams, working under authority from the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) to various European or Asian countries with Turkish- or Turkic-speaking populations, with as local heads officials from the Turkish consulates;
- Turkey has recently recognized a series of languages such as Kurdish (Kurmanji), Arabic and Zaza as minority languages together with several other smaller ethnic group languages. A few private schools teaching Kurdish have recently been allowed to open. Kurdish language TV broadcasts a few hours a week on government-owned stations while the private national channels show no interest as there is already satellite Kurdish TV operating from Western Europe and broadcasting in Kurdish, Turkish and Neo-Aramaic languages, Med TV;
- Non-Muslim minority numbers are said to be falling rapidly, mainly as a result of aging, migration (to Israel, Greece, the United States and Western Europe).
- There is concern over the future of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate which suffers from a lack of trained clergy due to the closure of the Halki school. The state does not recognise the Ecumenical status of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Official census-based estimate per December 31, 2007
- ^ Within the defition established and internationally agreed in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, three minority groups are officially recognized in Turkey, namely Armenians, Greeks and Jews.
- ^ [1] WorldBank Turkey create your own search for better stats
- ^ Intute (2006-07). Turkey - Population and Demographics. Intute. Retrieved on 2006-12-10.
- ^ CIA World Factbook, 2007 (HTML) (English). CIA (December 2007). Retrieved on 2007-12-17.
- ^ Shankland, David (2003). The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition. Routledge (UK). ISBN 0-7007-1606-8.
- ^ Eurobarometer on Social Values, Science and technology 2005 (PDF). Eurobarometer. Retrieved on 2007-12-18.
- ^ Richard Wike and Juliana Menasce Horowitz. Lebanon's Muslims: Relatively Secular and Pro-Christian. Pew Global Attitudes Project.
- ^ "The Islamic veil across Europe", British Broadcasting Corporation, 2006-11-17. Retrieved on 2006-12-13.
- ^ European Court of Human Rights (2005-11-10). Leyla Şahin v. Turkey. ECHR. Retrieved on 2006-11-30.
- ^ American Heritage Dictionary (2000). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition - "Turk". Houghton Mifflin Company. Retrieved on 2006-12-27.
- ^ CIA — The World Factbook. CIA. Retrieved on 2006-03-11.
- ^ Sirkeci, Ibrahim (2006), The Environment of Insecurity in Turkey and the Emigration of Turkish Kurds to Germany, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 117-118, ISBN 978-0-7734-5739-3, <http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=6794&pc=9>. Retrieved on 11 August 2006.
- ^ Turkish Statistical Institute (2004-10-18). Population and Development Indicators - Population and education. Turkish Statistical Institute. Retrieved on 2006-12-11.
- ^ Heinz Kloss & Grant McConnel, Linguistic composition of the nations of the world, vol,5, Europe and USSR, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 1984, ISBN 2-7637-7044-4
[edit] References
- UE Commission, 'Issues arising from Turkey's EU membership', 2004, http://europa.eu/comm/enlargement/report_2004/pdf/issues_paper_en.pdf, 2004.
- UE Commission, 'Recommendation of the European Commission on Turkey's progress towards ascession', 2004, http://europa.eu/comm/enlargement/report_2004/pdf/tr_recommendation_en.pdf.
- AI report on Turkey, 2003, http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/Tur-summary-englink
- Human Rights Watch overview, 2003, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/12/31/turkey7023.htm
- Human Rights Watch Bachgrounder, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/turkey/2004/torture/2.htm
- Andrews, Peter A. Ethnic groups in the Republic of Turkey., Beiheft Nr. B 60, Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Wiesbaden: Reichert Publications, 1989, ISBN 3-89500-297-6 ; + 2nd enlarged edition in 2 vols., 2002, ISBN 3-89500-229-1
- Encyclopedic Dictionary of Black Sea
- Lazuri - Selma Koçiva (In Turkish and Laz)
|
|
|---|
|
Afghanistan · Armenia · Azerbaijan1 · Bahrain · Bangladesh · Bhutan · Brunei · Burma · Cambodia · China (People's Republic of China [Hong Kong · Macau] · Republic of China [Taiwan]) · Cyprus · East Timor1 · Egypt1 · Georgia1 · India · Indonesia1 · Iran · Iraq · Israel · Japan · Jordan · Kazakhstan1 · Korea (North Korea · South Korea) · Kuwait · Kyrgyzstan · Laos · Lebanon · Malaysia · Maldives · Mongolia · Nepal · Northern Cyprus2 · Oman · Pakistan · Palestinian territories3 · Philippines · Qatar · Russia1 · Saudi Arabia · Singapore · Sri Lanka · Syria · Tajikistan · Thailand · Turkey1 · Turkmenistan · United Arab Emirates · Uzbekistan · Vietnam · Yemen1 |
| 1 Transcontinental country. 2 Only recognised by Turkey. 3 Not fully independent. |
|
|
|---|
|
Afghanistan · Armenia · Azerbaijan1 · Bahrain · Bangladesh · Bhutan · Brunei · Burma · Cambodia · China (People's Republic of China [Hong Kong · Macau] · Republic of China [Taiwan]) · Cyprus · East Timor1 · Egypt1 · Georgia1 · India · Indonesia1 · Iran · Iraq · Israel · Japan · Jordan · Kazakhstan1 · Korea (North Korea · South Korea) · Kuwait · Kyrgyzstan · Laos · Lebanon · Malaysia · Maldives · Mongolia · Nepal · Northern Cyprus2 · Oman · Pakistan · Palestinian territories3 · Philippines · Qatar · Russia1 · Saudi Arabia · Singapore · Sri Lanka · Syria · Tajikistan · Thailand · Turkey1 · Turkmenistan · United Arab Emirates · Uzbekistan · Vietnam · Yemen1 |
| 1 Transcontinental country. 2 Only recognised by Turkey. 3 Not fully independent. |
