Teaching Turkish in Afghanistan and the Turks of Afghanistan Afganistan’da Türkçe Öğretimi ve Afganistan Türkleri

The modern power of the new world is cultural strength. This cultural power is necessary to create and maintain a cultural sphere of influence. The stronger states can keep the cultural impact circle, the less they are affected by environmental factors. Language Teaching is also an essential component of Cultural Diplomacy called soft power. The experience of teaching Turkish as a foreign language does not have a long history. In the last two decades, efforts to teach Turkish as a foreign language have increased with many institutions in many countries worldwide. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is also one of the countries where these studies have been shown. There is a very significant target audience in Afghanistan who are eager to learn Turkish. In this study, we tried to present the teaching of Turkish in a foreign language with our field observations on the example of Afghanistan. We tried to portray the ethnocultural structure of Afghanistan, the effects on the Afghan people, the desire to learn foreign languages, and the importance of Turkish in these foreign languages. In this study, we discussed briefly yesterday, today, and tomorrow the Turkish teaching in Afghanistan. We analyzed the outlook of Turkish education across the country, the status of Turkish education in universities, courses, private and public schools. We also researched the answer to why the Afghan people want to learn the language of Turkish. We tried to express our observations based on what factors of Turkish learning are done outside of educational environments. We tried to reflect the ethnic structure of Afghanistan and the Turkish nobles’ social, cultural, economic, political, and educational situation within this structure by adding our field observations.