Tatars

Tatars (Tatar: Tatarlar/????????) is a collective name applied to the Turkic people of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The name is derived from Ta-ta or Dada, a Mongolian tribe that inhabited present Northeast Mongolia in the 5th cent A.D. First used to describe the peoples that overran parts of Asia and Europe under Mongol leadership in the 13th century A.D., it was later extended to include almost any Asian nomadic invader, whether from Mongolia or the fringes of Western Asia. Before the 1920s Russians used the name Tatar to designate a numerous peoples from the Azerbaijani Turks to tribes of the Siberia.

Generic meaning

It is evident from the above that the name Tatars was originally applied to both the Turkic and Mongol stems which invaded Europe six centuries ago, and gradually extended to the Turkic stems mixed with Mongol or Finnish blood in Siberia. It is used at present in two senses:

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• Quite loosely to designate any of the Ural-Altaic tribes, except perhaps Osmanlis, Finns and Magyars, to whom it is not generally applied. Thus some writers talk of the Manchu Tatars,
• In a more restricted sense to designate Muslim Turkic-speaking tribes, especially in Russia, who never formed part of the Seljuk or Ottoman Empire, but made independent settlements and remained more or less cut off from the politics and civilization of the rest of the Islamic world.
• Kazan (Tatastan) Tatars have more common with the Chuvash, Maris and Russians than with Bashkirs and other Turkic peoples. They are, also like the Chuvash remnants of Volga Bulgars. Volga Bulgars was a mixed people, which included Turkic, Magyar and Scythian blood. (In Turkic bol?ar means mixed). After coming to Middle Volga, Bulgars mixed with Finnic tribes. In the Golden Horde period Bulgars were mixed with Slavs, Greeks, Mongols. So there are no another 'Tatars' like Kazan Tatars which have so many ancestors.
• Bashkirs speak a language very similar to the Kazan Tatar language. But this is Tatarification of Magyar and Turkic tribes living in Ural. Bashkirs (also like the Chuvash and Maris) lived in a state where Tatar was the official language (Khanate of Kazan). Nowadays Bashkortostan official policy is to consider Tatar a dialect of Bashkir and all Bashkortostanian Tatars Bashkirs. Number of Tatars in Bashkortostan is close to 1,100,000 and the number of Bashkirs is nearly 1,200,000.