Abstract

Turkey is an ethnolinguistically diverse country, hosting five language families, over thirty living languages, and more than thirty minority ethnic groups. Understanding the ethnolinguistic landscape of the region is integral to making predictions regarding population movement initiated by the ongoing war in Syria. The purpose of this paper is to define the ethnolinguistic landscape of Turkey through open source research, to predict the areas of this landscape that will likely increase over the next twelve to twenty-four months using gravity model equations, and to simulate the largest and most imminent alteration to Turkey’s ethnogeography: the Syrian refugee population movement.