Chingis speaking Tatar
This video was recorded in Kazan in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia, featuring and filmed by Chingis. Tatar is spoken by 4,280,000 people in Russia and is a member of the Turkic language family. Tatar is an official language of the Republic of Tatarstan along with Russian. There has been some controversy over the script Tatar should be written in: a 1999 law establishing an official Tatar Latin alphabet was overridden in 2002 by Russian Federal law, making Cyrillic the only officially recognized script. Following a decline in usage beginning in the 1930s, Tatar was recognized as potentially endangered in 2001; at the same time, its close relatives Siberian and Crimean Tatar were deemed endangered and seriously endangered. As with other Turkic languages, Tatar is agglutinative, characterized by an abundance of affixes and morphemes, and a fairly regular verb system.