Since Caroline already posted a brief history on the language I've decided to go into my experience of learning about the Turkish language's history rather than the history itself although some overlap will probably be unavoidable.
Before going to Turkey I assumed it was Turkish they spoke but I wasn't entirely sure (dumb, I know). I decided to take a class called Contemporary Trends in Eurasia that was taught by a very sarcastic, funny kind of pan-Turkic nationalist. We learned a lot about the post-Soviet states in the Balkans but most of our time was focused on the 5 Central Asian republics. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. With the exception of Tajikistan, a working knowledge of Turkish would benefit you greatly if you were to find yourself in any of those four countries. Not only in these 4 republics but multiple Autonomous Regions in the Russian Federation contain many dialects of the Turkish language. My teacher spoke Uzbek and Kazakh fluently and said he easily learned them both within about two months. Even the western province of Xinjiang in China is inhabited by Uighurs who are ethnically Turkic.
Because of the great extent of the Turkic languages throughout Central Asia, Turkey finds itself involved in many political situations that it would otherwise not find itself involved. For example, the Uighurs attempted and actually succeeded in breaking away from the country of China and setting up the republic of Eastern Turkestan. A large amount of support initially came from Turkey. Sympathetic pan-Turkic nationalists who believed in the cause of their fellow Turkic brethren gave lots of financial support and this resulted in some significant political unrest between the Turkish and Chinese governments.
Learning about the history of the Turkish/Turkic languages gave me some humbling knowledge. I say humbling because I tend to consider English as a giant and all other languages as little tiny dwarfs when places next to it. Had I never gone to Turkey or learned some basic history of the language, I would probably continue to think the same way today.
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