The Chinese Tatars

Tatars

Tatars are a Turkic speaking ethnic group , numbering roughly 7 million.The majority of Tatars live in the Russian Federation, with a population of around 5.5 million, about 2 million of which in the republic of Tatarstan.Significant minority populations are found in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,...

' onMouseout='HidePop("91361")' href="/topics/Tatar_language">Tatar language

Tatar language

The Tatar language , or more specifically Kazan Tatar, is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars of historical Kazan Khanate, including modern Tatarstan and Bashkiria...

: Кытай татарлары) form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

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Their ancestors are Volga Tatar tradesmen who settled mostly in Xinjiang

Xinjiang

Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...

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The number of Chinese Tatars is close to 5000 as of 2000, and they live mainly in the cities of Aletai, Changji, Yili

Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture

Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture , in northernmost Xinjiang, is the only Kazakh autonomous prefecture of the People's Republic of China.-Geography and coordinates:The following figures excludes both Tacheng Prefecture and Altay Prefecture....

, Ürümqi

Ürümqi

Ürümqi , formerly Tihwa , is the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, in the northwest of the country....

, Tacheng

Tacheng

-References:* Khālidī, Qurbanʻali, Allen J. Frank, and Mirkasym Abdulakhatovich Usmanov. An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770-1912. Brill's Inner Asian library, v. 12. Leiden: Brill, 2004....

 and other places in Xinjiang.

Chinese Tatars speak an archaic variant of the Tatar language, free from 20th-century loanwords and use Arabic variant of the Tatar alphabet

Iske imlâ

İske imlâ is a variant of the Arabic script, used for the Tatar language before 1920 and the Old Tatar language. This alphabet can be referred to as old only to contrast it with Yaña imlâ....

, declined in USSR in 1930s

Latinisation (USSR)

In the USSR, latinisation was the name of the campaign during the 1920s-1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for numerous languages with the Latin alphabet and to create for languages had no writing. Almost all Turkic, Iranian, Uralic and several other languages were romanized,...

. Being surrounded by speakers of other Turkic languages, Chinese Tatar partially reverses the Tatar high vowel inversion. They do not have a writing system.