The Turkic migrations were the spread of Turkic tribes and Turkic languages across Eurasia between the 4th and 11th centuries. In the 6th century, the Göktürks overthrew the Rouran Khaganate in what is now Mongolia and expanded in all directions, spreading Turkic culture throughout the Eurasian steppes. Although Göktürk empires came to an end in the 8th century, they were succeeded by numerous Turkic empires such as the Uyghur Khaganate, Kara-Khanid Khanate, Khazars, and the Cumans. Some Turks eventually settled down into sedentary societies such as the Qocho and Ganzhou Uyghurs. The Seljuq dynasty invaded Anatolia starting in the 11th century, resulting in permanent Turkic settlement and presence there. Modern nations with large Turkic populations include Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and Turkic populations also exist within other nations, such as Chuvashia, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan and the Sakha Republic of Siberia in Russia, Northern Cyprus, the Crimean Tatars, the Kazakhs in Mongolia, the Uyghurs in China, and the Azeris in Iran.

Proposals for the homeland (Urheimat) of the Turkic peoples and their language are far-ranging, from the Transcaspian steppe to Northeastern Asia (Manchuria). Peter Benjamin Golden listed Proto-Turkic lexical items about the climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence in the hypothetical Proto-Turkic Urheimat and proposed that the Proto-Turkic Urheimat was located at the southern, taiga-steppe zone of the Sayan-Altay region. According to Yunusbayev et al. (2015), genetic evidence points to an origin in the region near South Siberia and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity. Similarly several linguists, including Juha Janhunen, Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that Mongolia is the homeland of the early Turkic language. According to Robbeets, the Turkic people descend from people who lived in a region extending from present-day South Siberia and Mongolia to the West Liao River Basin (modern Manchuria). Authors Joo-Yup Lee and Shuntu Kuang analyzed ten years of genetic research on Turkic people and compiled scholarly information about Turkic origins, and said that the early and medieval Turks were a heterogeneous group and that the Turkification of Eurasia was a result of language diffusion, not a migration of a homogeneous population.

The Huns have often been considered a people with Turkic origins and/or associated with the Xiongnu. However, the precise origins and identity of the Huns are still debated. In regard to their cultural genesis, the Cambridge Ancient History of China asserts that "from about the eighth century BC, throughout inner Asia horse-riding pastoral communities appeared, giving origin to warrior societies". These were part of a larger belt of "equestrian pastoral peoples" stretching from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and known collectively to the Greeks as Scythians. The Huns per se were first documented as a nomadic people, in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, between the 4th and 6th century AD. According to the first European sources to mention the Huns, they were then living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of Scythia at the time; the Huns' arrival is associated with the migration westward of an Indo-Iranian people, the Alans. After entering Europe, the Huns incorporated members of other peoples, such as the Alans, Slavs and Goths.

None or few of the Huns were literate (judging by the accounts of contemporaries such as Procopius). They left no texts and few other linguistic clues to their origins, apart from personal names. Some names, such as Ultinčur and Alpilčur, apparently had endings related to suffixes used in Turkic personal names: Old Turkic -čor, Pecheneg -tzour and Kirghiz -čoro. Some Turkic ethnonyms had cognate endings, such as Utigur, Onogur, and Ultingir. However, other personal names among the Huns appear to have had Iranian, Germanic, mixed or unknown origins.

The earliest Turks mentioned in textual sources are the Xinli (薪犁), Gekun (鬲昆), and Tiele (鐵勒), the last of which possibly transcribes endonym *Tegreg '[People of the] Carts', recorded by the Chinese in the 6th century. According to the New Book of Tang, Tiele may be a mistaken form of Chile/Gaoche, who themselves may be related to Xiongnu and Dingling.

Many scholars believe the Di, Dili, Dingling, and later Tujue mentioned in textual sources are all just Chinese transcriptions of the same Turkic word türk, yet Golden proposes that Tujue transcribed *Türküt while Dili, Dingling, Chile, Tele, & Tiele transcribed *Tegreg.

The first reference to Türk or Türküt appears in 6th-century Chinese sources as the transcription Tūjué (突厥). The earliest evidence of Turkic languages and the use of Turk as an endonym comes from the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (English: 'Celestial Turks' ) in the early 8th century. Many groups speaking Turkic languages never adopted the name Turk for their own identity. Among the peoples that came under Göktürk dominance and adopted its political culture and lingua-franca, the name Turk was not always the preferred identity. Turk, therefore, did not apply to all Turkic peoples at the time, but only referred to the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, while the Western Turkic Khaganate and Tiele used their own tribal names. Of the Tiele, the Book of Sui mentions only tribes which were not a part of the First Turkic Khaganate. There was not a unified expansion of Turkic tribes. Peripheral Turkic peoples in the Göktürk Empire like the Bulgars and even central ones like the Oghuz and Karluks migrated autonomously with migrating traders, soldiers and townspeople.

The precise date of the initial expansion from the early homeland remains unknown. The first state known as Turk, giving its name to the many states and peoples afterward, was that of the Göktürks (gök 'blue' or 'celestial', however in this context gök refers to the direction 'east'. Therefore, Gökturks only denoted the Eastern Turks in the 6th century. In 439, the head of the Ashina clan led his people from Pingliang (now in modern Gansu province, China) to the Rouran seeking inclusion in their confederacy and protection. His tribe consisted of famed metalsmiths and was granted land near a mountain quarry that looked like a helmet, from which they got the name Turk/Tujue 突厥. In 546, the leader of the Ashina, Bumin, aided the Rouran in putting down a Tiele revolt. Bumin requested a Rouran princess for his service but was denied, after which he declared independence. In 551, Bumin declared himself Khagan and married Princess Changle from Western Wei. He then dealt a serious blow to the Rouran Khaganate the next year, but died soon after. His sons, Issik Qaghan and Muqan Qaghan, continued to wage war on the Rouran, finishing them off in 554. By 568, their territory had reached the edges of the Byzantine Empire, where the Avars, possibly related to the Rouran in some fashion, escaped. In 581, Taspar Qaghan died and the khaganate entered a civil war that resulted in two separate Turkic factions. The Eastern Khaganate was defeated by the Tang dynasty in 630 while the Western Khaganate fell to the Tang in 657. In 682, Ilterish Qaghan rebelled against the Tang and founded the Second Turkic Khaganate, which fell to the Uyghurs in 744.