Talk:Iraqi Turkmen

Ethnologue/ "Leclerc 2014b"

Ethnologue states that there is "Azerbaijani, South" and "Turkmen" spoken in Iraq. It cites "Leclerc 2014b" to support this, which is actually this questionable source (you can also find this link on Ethnologue's bibliography page). Unfortunately, "Leclerc 2014b" does not provide ANY linguistic sources in its bibliography; rather, it uses mostly political/historical citations -- which raises questions as to why Ethnologue would use this as a "linguistic source". More questionable is the inconsistencies and incorrect claims; for example, at first the source says that Azeris form 4% of the population and then further down the article it changes to 5.9%. I have not found a single academic source supporting these claims. The source also claims that Turkmen form 1% of the population (yet official Iraqi statistics have placed the Turkmen as 9% of the population); and then the source says that "The Turkmen are Sunni", later then changing to "Sunni and Shiite Turkmens". Despite all these inconsistencies, the source claims that the Iraqi Turkmen speak Turkmen, and that this [imagined] Azeri community speak South Azerbaijani; it does not claim that Iraqi Turkmen speak South Azeri. For this reason, I have removed Ethnologue from this article. Selçuk Denizli (talk) 17:08, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Also, I want to mention that Ethnologue has a track record for citing incorrectly. It had previously claimed that there was 50,000 Turkish speakers in Bosnia. This was later corrected and the reply can be found on Talk:Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina.Selçuk Denizli (talk) 17:10, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

@Selçuk Denizli: Ethnologue is not the only source that describes the Oghuz varieties spoken by the Iraqi Turkmen as being closer to Azeri than to Turkish (so does Doerfer and many others cited in the "Language" section). I do not understand why you are coming back to this issue after a rather exhaustive discussion here, which ended in quite a suitable compromise that you (among others) agreed to. In particular, I am curious as to your reasons for adding a whole sub-section on "Politicization" based on a single opinion by Bulut (whose opinion appears to be in the minority regarding the statements she makes about "Turcological literature" to begin with), which already violates WP:REDFLAG and WP:WEIGHT. Not only did you cherry-pick the information (Bulut does not say that publications from Azerbaijan are the only ones to classify Iraqi Turkmen dialects as Azeri), you also removed the word "often" from the quote, making it seem that any publication dealing with the Iraqi Turkmen that comes from Azerbaijan is necessarily politically biased. The section of "Politicization" is heavily POV in its current state; I suggest integrating it into the "Language" section. Parishan (talk) 18:46, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Find me one source that claims that Azeris make up 5.9% of Iraq's population and then we can talk further about Ethnologue. Otherwise I don't have time for all this Azeri nationalist nonsense. The article already uses the word "often" -- I haven't removed that: "Professor Christiane Bulut has argued that publications from Azerbaijan often use expressions such as...". I wont be wasting my time with you. But funny how this source is suddenly unreliable when many of you used Bulut in the past to claim that she called the language South Azeri (she probably saw the stupidity of Wikipedia and then decided to clarify herself furhter!). Also, Iraqi Turkmen scholar Professor Suphi Saatçi agrees that the terms used are politicized. Not a minority view. Selçuk Denizli (talk) 15:10, 26 August 2019 (UTC)