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This article is about the ethnic group called Turks. For information on the demographics of Turkey, see Turkey/People. For other uses of the word Turk, see Turk

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.

The Oğuz people, which once constituted the majority of the reigning fraction of Turkic people in Anatolia, gained political and military dominance in the region but remained for centuries demographically speaking only a tiny part of the population. Anatolia, which was formerly a part of the Byzantine Empire, was (and still is) especially an ethnically very mixed region where the official religion was Greek Orthodox, with many adherents of other Christian churches or "deviant" Christian or syncretist movements, as well as Jews. It is, therefore, absurd to speak about a "pure Turkish race", even more in the tangled ethnic mix of Anatolia. Race as a genetic-based social category is in any case a concept of the XIXth century, no longer accepted by social scientists.

As a matter of fact, most present-day Turks are the offspring of all sorts of populations whose original languages have sometimes been extinct several centuries ago. While perhaps less than one-third of those who self-identify as ethnic Turks in Turkey today are predominantly of Altaic origin, the remainder are actually an amalgamation of Turkified Greeks, Armenians, Roma, Georgians, Kurds, Slavs, Assyrians and other peoples. 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.

An exception is the the Hamshenis, Armenian Christians converted to Islam in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, still keep some Christian 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-speaking 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 many ancesters who feared to pass on any non-Turkish or non-Muslim traditions to their children from fear of a rehearsal of past massacres and genocides. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Black Sea website based on the research by Özhan Öztürk, but also the books of Ömer Asan and Selma Koçiva (see also her site at http://www.lazuri.com/ only in Turkish and Laz languages) are good illustrations ot this trend, unthinkable 5 years ago and still under attack of (right- and left-wing) Turkish nationalists who label it as pure "national treason" and "betrayal of Atatürk's heritage".

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, descendents of Sabbatai Zevi's followers who had to convert en masse following Zevi's example.

People walking in a Turkish street or watching a Turkish movie can see Turks of about all physical types prevalent in the world, from the blond haired and-blue-eyed to the slant-eyed mongoloid individuals or the black-haired Mediterranean-looking ones, and even people with some Black African roots, from the times when the Ottoman Empire stretched till Somalia, including Sudan.

Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic welcomed altogether hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of

• Spanish and Portuguese Jews after 1492;
• political and confessional refugees from Central Europe: Russian schismatics in XVII-XVIIIth centuries, 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 1930's;
• Muslim refugees (Muhajir) from formerly Muslim-dominated regions invaded by Christian States, like Tatars, Circassians and Chechens from the Russian Empire, Algerian followers of Abd-el-Kader, Mahdists from Sudan, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kirghizs 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.

Proving the difficulty of classifying ethnicities living in Turkey, there are as many classifications as the number of scientific attempts to make these classifications. Turkey is not a unique example for that and many European countries (e.g. France, Germany) bear a great ethnic diversity. So, the immense diversity observed in the published figures for the percentages of Turkish people living in Turkey (ranging from 75 to 97%) totally depends on the method used to classify the ethnicities. 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 and many of the figures published after that time are very loose estimates.

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):

1. Turkic-speaking peoples: Kirghizs, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kumyks, Yürüks, Uzbeks, Tatars, Azeris, Balkars, Uighurs, Karachays.
2. Kurds and Zazas
3. Arabs and Assyrians
4. Georgians and Laz
5. Armenians and Hamshenis
6. Greeks, Pontic Greeks and Greek-speaking Muslims
7. Other Muslim groups originally from the Balkans (Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbians, Croatians, Romanians and Bosniaks): These people migrated to Anatolia during the Ottoman Era and have been assumed to accept Turkish-Muslim identity.
8. Circassians and Chechens
9. 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).

• Turkish people
• Ethnic groups of the Middle East
• Turkic peoples