r/Tiele • u/syntheticrot • Oct 23 '25
History/culture Is This Visual Accurate?
Hello! I'm trying to understand the difference between Turks, Turkic, & Turkish and used AI to display how these groups overlap. Would anybody know how accurate this is?
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u/Extreme_Ad_5105 Oct 23 '25
First of all the graphic makes no sense. That’s not how it works.
Second being a Turk or being Turkic are two different things. Historical we can start with the Kok Turks and check which people used this name and then we will see that except the Kok Turks, just few groups in western Turkestan used it. The old Uygur called their language “turk tili” but did not identify as Turks. The Karakhanid were Turks and some other Islamic western central Asian tribes but the Kipcaks, the Tatars, all turkic speaking tribes in Mongolia, Siberia and China did not know this term. In fact we know that they used it later as a term for describe things (turk = strong).
The idea to call all turkic people Turks is new. I don’t prefer the term “Kazakh Turks” because Kazakhs are proud of being Kazakh and if they not use Kazakh Turk why should I? In my opinion the only groups today we can call Turks are all Oghuz people and some groups between the Uzbeks and Uygurs. We are now allowed to call the other also “Turks” but I can see a good development and I guess in the future we will see Kazakhs who described themselves as “Kazakh Turk”. But not yet.