Area | 4,003,451 km2 (1,545,741 sq mi) |
---|---|
Population | 75,897,577 (2021) (16th)[1][2] |
Population density | 17.43/km2 (45.1/sq mi) |
GDP (PPP) | $1.25 trillion (2023)[3] |
GDP (nominal) | $446 billion (2023)[3] |
GDP per capita | $5,900 (2023; nominal)[3] $16,400 (2023; PPP)[3] |
HDI | 0.779 (high) |
Demonym | Central Asian |
Countries | |
Languages | Dungan, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Koryo-mar, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Russian, Tajik, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, and others |
Time zones | 2 time zones
|
Internet TLD | .kg, .kz, .tj, .tm, .uz |
Calling code | Zone 9 except Kazakhstan (Zone 7) |
Largest cities | |
UN M49 code | 143 – Central Asia142 – Asia001 – World |
a With population over 500,000 people |
Central Asia is a subregion of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the southwest and European Russia in the northwest to Western China and Mongolia in the east,[4] and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Siberia in the north. It includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.[5] The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan" (meaning "land of") in both respective native languages and most other languages.[6] Central Asia borders Eastern Europe to the west, West Asia to the southwest, South Asia to the southeast, North Asia to the north, and East Asia to the east.
In the pre-Islamic and early Islamic eras (c. 1000 and earlier) Central Asia was inhabited predominantly by Iranian people,[7][8] populated by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians, and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Dahae. After expansion by Turkic people, Central Asia also became the homeland for the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tatars, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, and Uyghurs; Turkic languages largely replaced the Iranian languages spoken in the area, with the exception of Tajikistan and areas where Tajik is spoken.
The Silk Road trade routes crossed through Central Asia, leading to the rise of prosperous trade cities.[9][10] acting as a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, and ideas between Europe and the Far East.[11][12][13] Most countries in Central Asia are still integral to parts of the world economy.[14]
From the mid-19th century until almost the end of the 20th century, Central Asia was colonised by the Russians, and incorporated into the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, which led to Russians and other Slavs emigrating into the area. Modern-day Central Asia is home to a large population of European settlers, who mostly live in Kazakhstan; 7 million Russians, 500,000 Ukrainians,[15][16][17] and about 170,000 Germans.[18] Stalinist-era forced deportation policies also mean that over 300,000 Koreans live there.[19]
Central Asia has a population of about 72 million, in five countries: Kazakhstan (19 million), Kyrgyzstan (7 million), Tajikistan (10 million), Turkmenistan (6 million), and Uzbekistan (35 million).[20]
In early Islamic times Persians tended to identify all the lands to the northeast of Khorasan and lying beyond the Oxus with the region of Turan, which in the Šāh-nāma of Ferdowsī is regarded as the land allotted to Ferēdūn's son Tūr. The denizens of Tūrān were held to include the Turks, in the first four centuries of Islam essentially those nomadizing beyond the Jaxartes, and behind them the Chinese (see Kowalski; Minorsky, "Tūrān"). Tūrān thus became both an ethnic and a geographical term, but always containing ambiguities and contradictions, arising from the fact that all through Islamic times the lands immediately beyond the Oxus and along its lower reaches were the homes not of Turks but of Iranian peoples, such as the Sogdians and Khwarezmians.
In Central Asia the collision of modernity and tradition led all but the most deracinated of the intellectuals-clerics to seek salvation in reconstituted variants of traditional identities rather than succumb to the modern European idea of nationalism. The inability of the elites to form a united front, as demonstrated in the numerous declarations of autonomy by different authorities during the Russian civil war, paved the way, in the early 1920s for the Soviet re-conquest of the Central Asia in the early 1920s.