Central Asia

Not to be confused with Soviet Central Asia.

Central Asia
Area4,003,451 km2 (1,545,741 sq mi)
Population75,897,577 (2021) (16th)[1][2]
Population density17.43/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]
HDIIncrease0.779 (high)
DemonymCentral Asian
Countries
LanguagesDungan, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Koryo-mar, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Russian, Tajik, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, and others
Time zones
2 time zones
  • UTC+05:00:
  • UTC+06:00:
Internet TLD.kg, .kz, .tj, .tm, .uz
Calling codeZone 9 except Kazakhstan (Zone 7)
Largest cities
Lista
UN M49 code
  • 143 – Central Asia
  • 142 – Asia
  • 001 – World

Central Asia is a region of Asia bounded by the Caspian Sea to the southwest, European Russia to the northwest, Western China and Mongolia to the east,[4] Afghanistan and Iran to the south, and Siberia to 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') in both respective native languages and most other languages.

In the pre-Islamic and early Islamic eras (c. 1000 and earlier) Central Asia was inhabited predominantly by Iranian peoples,[6][7] populated by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians, and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Dahae. As the result of Turkic migration, Central Asia also became the homeland for the Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Tatars, Turkmens, Uyghurs, and Uzbeks; 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.[8][9] acting as a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, and ideas between Europe and the Far East.[10][11][12] Most countries in Central Asia are still integral to parts of the world economy.[13]

From the mid-19th century until near 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 migrating 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,[14][15][16] and about 170,000 Germans.[17] During the Stalinist period, the forced deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union resulted in a population of over 300,000 Koreans in the region.[18]

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).[19]

  1. ^ "World Population prospects – Population division". United Nations. Archived from the original on 5 February 2019. Retrieved 16 July 2019.
  2. ^ "Overall total population" (xlsx). United Nations. Archived from the original on 18 February 2020. Retrieved 16 July 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d "World Economic Outlook Database, April 2023". International Monetary Fund.
  4. ^ "Mongolia". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 8 June 2020. Retrieved 21 January 2022.
  5. ^ "Central Asia". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 7 November 2020. Retrieved 21 January 2022.
  6. ^ Bosworth, C. E. (1990). "CENTRAL ASIA iv. In the Islamic Period up to the Mongols". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). Encyclopædia Iranica, Volume V/2: C̆ehel Sotūn, Isfahan–Central Asia XIII. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 169–172. ISBN 978-0-939214-69-3. 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.
  7. ^ C. E. Bosworth, "The Appearance of the Arabs in Central Asia under the Umayyads and the establishment of Islam", in History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. IV: The Age of Achievement: AD 750 to the End of the Fifteenth Century, Part One: The Historical, Social and Economic Setting, edited by M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth. Multiple History Series. Paris: Motilal Banarsidass Publ./UNESCO Publishing, 1999. excerpt from page 23: "Central Asia in the early seventh century, was ethnically, still largely an Iranian land whose people used various Middle Iranian languages.".
  8. ^ "The Great Silk Roads". Silk Roads Programme. UNESCO. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  9. ^ Taseer, Aatish (11 May 2020). "In Uzbekistan, Coming to Terms With the Country's Dazzling History". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  10. ^ Adela C. Y. Lee. "Travelers on the Silk Road". Archived from the original on 25 May 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2014.
  11. ^ Ta'lim Primary 6 Parent and Teacher Guide (p. 72) – Islamic Publications Limited for the Institute of Ismaili Studies London
  12. ^ Phillips, Andrew; James, Paul (2013). "National Identity between Tradition and Reflexive Modernisation: The Contradictions of Central Asia". National Identities. 3 (1): 23–35. doi:10.1080/14608940020028475. S2CID 146570543. Archived from the original on 7 January 2022. Retrieved 13 December 2017. 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.
  13. ^ Frankopan, Peter (March 2017). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (First Vintage Books ed.). New York: Vintage Books. pp. xv–xvi. ISBN 978-1-101-94633-6.
  14. ^ Демоскоп Weekly – Приложение. Справочник статистических показателей Archived 16 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine. Demoscope.ru. Retrieved on 29 July 2013.
  15. ^ "5.01.00.03 Национальный состав населения" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 February 2009.
  16. ^ Итоги переписи населения Таджикистана 2000 года: национальный, возрастной, половой, семейный и образовательный составы Archived 7 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine. Demoscope.ru (20 January 2000). Retrieved on 29 July 2013.
  17. ^ Trochev, Alexei (22 February 2018), Horne, Cynthia M.; Stan, Lavinia (eds.), "Transitional Justice Attempts in Kazakhstan", Transitional Justice and the Former Soviet Union (1 ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–108, doi:10.1017/9781108182171.005, ISBN 978-1-108-18217-1, archived from the original on 10 April 2023, retrieved 4 December 2020
  18. ^ "Central Asia's Koreans in Korea: There and (Mostly) Back Again". openDemocracy. Archived from the original on 9 January 2021. Retrieved 12 August 2021.
  19. ^ "Демографическая ситуация" (PDF). Statistika qo'mitasi. Retrieved 19 March 2019.