I beg to differ I think the geographic distribution of the language has to be described even if briefly in the lede paragraph just like the geographic location of a country is described in the lede paragraph of its corresponding article Anyway I think the current version is the most suitable and eliminates the numerical doubts that Alex mentioned earlier Turkish T rk e also referred to as Istanbul Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages with around 10 15 million native speakers in Southeastern Europe and 55 60 million native speakers in Western Asia