family of languages consisting of three branches—Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus—that show similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features and which, on the basis of systematic sound correspondences, are generally considered to be genetically related. It contains more than 50 languages, spoken by more than 135 million people spread across virtually the entire breadth of Asia and from the Arctic Ocean to the latitude of Beijing. The Turkic languages are spoken principally in a nearly continuous band from Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan through the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to Xinjiang in China. The Mongolian languages are concentrated in the adjacent, roughly oval region formed by Buryatia, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia (China). The Manchu-Tungus languages are spoken by widely dispersed populations farther to the north and east—that is, across Siberia in Russia and in the Northeast in China.