The Chinese Tatars (simplified Chinese: 塔塔尔族; traditional Chinese: 塔塔爾族; pinyin: Tǎtǎ'ěrzú; Tatar language: Кытай татарлары) form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.
Their ancestors are Volga Tatar tradesmen who settled mostly in Xinjiang.
The number of Chinese Tatars is close to 5000 as of 2000, and they live mainly in the cities of Aletai, Changji, Yili, Ürümqi, Tacheng and other places in Xinjiang.
Chinese Tatars speak an archaic variant of the Tatar language, free from 20th-century loanwords and use the Arabic variant of the Tatar alphabet, which declined in the USSR in the 1930s. Being surrounded by speakers of other Turkic languages, Chinese Tatar partially reverses the Tatar high vowel inversion. They do not have a writing system.