page_title: Turkish Americans
section_title: Language
hierarchical_section_title: Turkish Americans / Culture / Language
caption_attribution_description: Islamic Center of Washington located at 2551 Massachusetts Avenue, NW in Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: Turkish Americans are Americans of Turkish descent or origin. About 25,000 to 50,000 Turks came to the United States between 1890 and 1924, most of them male peasants from both the European and Asian areas of Turkey. They largely settled to Industrial centers such as Detroit, Boston, and smaller mill towns in Massachusetts, such as Lowell and Salem.
context_section_description: Turkish is by far the most widely spoken of all Turkic languages, amounting to 40% of the total. Despite this, Turkish is not one of the languages taught in the public schools in the United States, even though there is a sizeable Turkish community in the country. According to the 2005 ACS (American Community Survey), there were 164,945 people with Turkish ancestry in the U.S., this number increasing to 189,640 in 2008. According to the 2000 Census, the Turkish language is spoken in 59,407 households within the entire U.S. population, and in 12,409 households in NYC alone by highly bilingual families with Turkish ancestry. These data show that many speakers with Turkish origins continue speaking the language at home despite the fact that they are highly bilingual. The number of English-proficient households using Turkish as a home-language outweighs that of families who have switched completely to English. In this sense, the Turkish American community efforts and the schools that serve the Turkish community in the U.S. are responsible for the retaining of the Turkish language and slowing of assimilation. A detailed study has documented the efforts of language and culture-disseminating schools of the Turkish American community and is available as a doctoral dissertation, a book, book chapters, and journal articles.
caption: The Islamic Center of Washington was originally conceived in 1944 when the Turkish ambassador Munir Ertegun died and there was no mosque to hold his funeral in.[39]
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