Turkey Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world. Various ancient Anatolian populations have lived in Anatolia, from at least the Neolithic period until the Hellenistic period. Many of these peoples spoke the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated. The European part of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has also been inhabited since at least forty thousand years ago, and is known to have been in the
Albanian-speakers of Western Thrace Muslims of Western Thrace and the Christians of Istanbul. Under this provision, the Albanian Orthodox community of Eastern Thrace, was re-accommodated in Western Thrace, where they settled mainly in new and ethnically homogeneous villages built in order to receive the refugees. Today, this population lives in the same villages, but a part emigrated to bigger towns such as Thessaloniki and Athens, making the Albanian language less used. Albanian-speakers inhabit 15 homogeneous and 14 mixed villages: Albanian-speakers of Western Thrace Albanian-speakers form a linguistic minority in Greek Macedonia and Western Thrace along the border with Turkey. They speak the Northern Tosk