Turkmen (türkmençe, türkmen dili, Cyrillic: түркменче, түркмен дили, Persian: تورکمن ﺗﻴﻠی, تورکمنچه) is the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 7,000,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 380,000 in northwestern Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern Iran.

Turkmen is in the Turkic Language Family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic sub-branch, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group also includes Khorasani Turkic. Turkmen is closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, with which it is for the most part mutually intelligible.

Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender or irregular verbs. Word order is subject–object–verb.

Written Turkmen today is based on the Teke (Tekke) dialect. The other dialects are Nohurly, Yomud, Änewli, Hasarly, Nerezim, Gökleň, Salyr, Saryk, Ärsary and Çowdur. The Teke dialect is sometimes (especially in Afghanistan) referred to as "Chagatai", but like all Turkmen dialects it reflects only a limited influence from classical Chagatai.

Richard L. Morningstar (born 1945) is the Special Envoy of the United States Secretary of State for Eurasian Energy.

Richard Morningstar earned a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, and a Master of Laws from Stanford Law School in 1970.

Morningstar started his career with the law firm of Peabody & Brown (now Nixon Peabody) in Boston, Massachusetts, where he practiced law from 1970 to 1981. He then served as CEO of Costar Corporation, and since 1990 as the Chairman of the Board. Since June 1993, Morningstar served as Senior Vice President for Policy and Investment Development at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. In April 1995, Morningstar was posted as the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Assistance to the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union. His rank of ambassador was confirmed by the Senate on 11 June 1996. In July 1998, he was assigned as a Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State for Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy. In that capacity Morningstar was a promoter of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline. In 1999–2001, Morningstar served as the United States Ambassador to the European Union.