Where Tatar is spoken
Tatar is spoken in 11 countries: Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China and 7 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | 1.4% | 1,971,494 |
| Azerbaijan | Not given | Not given |
| Belarus | Not given | Not given |
| China | Not given | Not given |
| Estonia | Not given | Not given |
| Finland | Not given | Not given |
| Georgia | Not given | Not given |
| Kazakhstan | Not given | Not given |
| Latvia | Not given | Not given |
| Lithuania | Not given | Not given |
| Ukraine | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Tatar is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Tatar.
How many people speak Tatar?
Wikidata gives about 5.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 2015). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Tatar sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Tatar as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Turkic
- Common Turkic
- Kipchak-Turkestan
- Kipchak
- Northwest Kipchak
- North Kipchak
- Bashkiric
- Tatar
Related languages
Other languages in the Bashkiric group:
- Bashkir (1.2 million speakers)
More about Tatar
Codes: ISO 639-3 tat, Glottolog tata1255. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Tatar
Where is Tatar spoken?
Tatar is spoken in Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China and 7 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.4% of the population of Russia, which is about 1,971,494 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Tatar?
Wikidata gives about 5.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 2015). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Tatar in?
Glottolog places Tatar in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Northwest Kipchak, North Kipchak and Bashkiric.