Turkmen, the official language of Turkmenistan, is the mother tongue of over 90% of the population. There are another 2 million or so speakers in North East Iran and about half a million in Afghanistan. It is a Turkic language, very similar to Turkish and Azerbaijani: speakers of these languages will understand a lot of Turkmen and vice versa. Turkmen was historically written with the Arabic and then Cyrillic scripts but now uses the Latin alphabet. Like other Turkic languages, it has no grammatical gender and no definite article.
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'Roll out your carpet and I shall read your soul' is a Turkmen saying.
Turkmen is used, along with Russian, in government administration and official situations in Turkmenistan.
At different times during the 20th century Turkmen was written in the Arabic and Cyrillic script.
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