Tatars

Lore & Background

The name "Tatar" originally may have described a confederation of steppe tribes that later became part of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan. Western mapmakers once used "Tatar" or "Tartar" for anyone from the vast region called Tartary, often wrongly linking it to the Mongol Empire. Today, the term more narrowly refers to ethnic groups that call themselves Tatars. The largest of these are the Volga Tatars, who live in the Volga-Ural area of European Russia, mainly in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and make up 53 percent of Tatarstan's population.

Their language is Tatar. In Russia, there were about 5.3 million ethnic Tatars. Although the three main Tatar groups—Volga, Crimean, and Siberian—speak languages from different Kipchak subgroups, genetic research shows they are not closely related and formed independently. However, at least one group may have been culturally influenced by the Golden Horde. Many noble families in the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire had Tatar ancestry.

Reader's Guide

Tatar became a name for populations of the former Golden Horde in Europe, such as those of the former Kazan, Crimean, Astrakhan, Qasim, and Siberian Khanates. The form Tartar has its origins in either Latin or French, coming to Western European languages from Turkish and the Persian ('mounted messenger'). From the beginning, the extra r was present in the Western forms and according to the Oxford English Dictionary this was most likely due to an association with Tartarus. The Persian word is first recorded in the 13th century in reference to the hordes of Genghis Khan and is of unknown origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is 'said to be' ultimately from tata.

The Arabic word for Tatars is . Tatars themselves wrote their name as or . Tatar was also an endonym to a number of peoples of Siberia and Russian Far East, namely Chulyms, also Khakas, Teleut, and Shor. Ochir (2016) states that Siberian Tatars and the Tatars living in the territories between Asia and Europe are of Turkic origin, acquired the appellation Tatar later, and do not possess ancestral connection to the Mongolic Nine Tatars, whose ethnogenesis involved Mongolic people as well as Mongolized Turks who had been ruling over them during the 6–8th centuries.

Valikhova et al. (2022) states that Siberian Tatars, at least Tom Tatars, have Mongol genetic component, which is in line with their genetic history. Pow (2019) proposes that Turkic-speaking peoples of Cumania (i.e. Polovtsians), as a sign of political allegiance, adopted the endonym Tatar of their Mongol conquerors, before ultimately subsuming the latter culturally and linguistically in the Golden Horde; therefore, the term Tatar was originally not just an exonym. Some Turkic peoples living within the Russian Empire were named Tatar, although not all Turkic peoples of Russian Empire were referred to as Tatars (for instance, this name was never used in relation to the Yakuts, Chuvashes, Sarts and some others). Some of these populations used and keep using Tatar as a self-designation, others do not.

Did You Know?

• The modern Tatar language, together with the Bashkir language, forms the Kypchak-Volga-Ural group within the Kipchak languages.
• Crimean Tatar is the indigenous language of the Crimean Tatar people, and is sometimes mistakenly seen in Russia as a dialect of Kazan Tatar.
• The Siberian Tatar language is independent of Volga–Ural Tatar, and its dialects are quite remote from Standard Tatar.