Tatars - Tatar Language

Tatar Language

The Tatar language together with the Bashkir language forms the Kypchak-Bolgar (also "Uralo-Caspian") group within the Kypchak languages (Northwestern Turkic).

There are three Tatar dialects: Eastern, Central, Western. The Western dialect (Misher) is spoken mostly by Mishärs, the Central dialect is spoken by Kazan and Astrakhan Tatars, and the Eastern (Sibir) dialect is spoken by Siberian Tatars in western Siberia. All three dialects have subdialects. Central Tatar is the base of literary Tatar.

Tatar was written with the Arabic alphabet prior to 1928, in the so-called İske imlâ alphabet and from 1920 to 1928 in the Yaña imlâ alphabet. In 1928 the Soviet Union introduced a Latin orthography, known as Jaŋalif. Jaŋalif was replaced by a Cyrillic orthography in 1940. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, use of Jaŋalif was revived, but the Cyrillic script was again enforced in 2002, when the Russian Federation passed a controversial law enforcing the use of Cyrillic for all official languages.