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From an ethnic point of view Turkmenistan is, unlike other republics originated from the division of the Soviet Union,
a quite homoge-neous country. The large majority of the population in fact is consti-tuted by the Turkmens, an ethnic group of Turkish stock originated from the Oghuz tribes settled
in the present territory of the country in the tenth century. The population of the country was essentially ho-mogeneous till the arrival of the Russian, that in the second half of the nineteenth
century transformed Turkmenistan into a province of the czarist empire. The Slavonic component of the local population appears in this period, anyway it became large only after the consti-tution in 1924
of the Turkmen Soviet Republic. In the second half of the tenth century the rate of increase in population of Turkmenistan remained quite high, causing a rapid growth of the population, that has increased from
the 2,897,000 inhabitants of 1981 to the current 5,725,200. With the growth of the population also the value showing the density of the population has rosen considerably, reaching, al-though the national average
in still low, very high levels in some areas of the country. It is important to underline the high level of education of the population of Turkmenistan, an element of funda-mental importance for satisfying the
requirements of cultural growth imposed by the rapid process of economic development in the course of realization in the country.
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