formerly Volga Tatar language
Turkic language with some eight million speakers.
Its speakers include less than half the population of Tatarstan in Russia, with the remainder scattered in enclaves across eastern European Russian, Siberia, and the Central Asian republics. Tatar, like the closely related Bashkir language, is characterized by a remarkable series of vowel shifts that distinguish it (at least in its most characteristic varieties) from all other Turkic languages. It has numerous dialect distinctions; the conventional division is between a central group that includes the Tatar of most of Tatarstan and the literary language based on Kazan speech, a western group, and an eastern group. Crimean Tatar, belonging to the southwestern group of Turkic languages, and Chulym Tatar, belonging to the northeastern group, are not closely related to Tatar.