Tatar — Lingualia

01. Data about the language

Language group

Turkic / Kipchak

Area

Not limited to one region.
Tatar belongs to the Turkic language family, more precisely to the Kipchak group, like Bashkir and Kazakh; Turkish belongs to another group, the Oghuz languages (Glottolog classification, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology).

Updated, sourced data, checked on 14 October 2026 · scope : Finlande

Numerical strength

On 31 December 2025, 248 people had Tatar as their mother tongue recorded in the Finnish population register, against 184 in 2015¹.

Status

The Finnish Constitution (Section 17) guarantees the Sámi, as an indigenous people, as well as the Roma and "other groups" the right to maintain and develop their own language and culture².

Sources

StatFin, tableau 11rm « Language according to sex by municipality, 1990-2025 » (population au 31 décembre), Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskus), 2026.
Constitution of Finland (731/1999), traduction anglaise non officielle, section 17, Finlex, ministère de la Justice de Finlande, consulté en 2026.

02. Poem

Original Translation

Tugan til

Mother tongue

I tugan tıl, i matur tıl, etkem-enkemnıñ tılı ! Dönyada küp nerse bıldımsin tugan tıl arkılı.

Mother tongue, you're my soul and you're my heart. Many things I've learnt in this life through this language, through my blood.

I˙ñ ılık bu tıl bılen enkem bis¸ıkte köylegen, Annari tönner buyı ebkem hikayet söylegen.

Little baby in his cradle tries to hold his Mummy tight. I remember how my Granny Told me fairy tales at night.

I tugan tıl! Hervakıtta yerdemıñ bırlem sinıñ, Kıçkıneden añlas¸ılgan s¸atlıgım, kaygım minım

Oh, my language, native language, you're my soul and you're my heart. My childhood till the old age, you're the treasure of my heart.

tugan tıl! Sinde bulgan iñ ılık kılgan doam: Yarlıkagıl, dip, üzım hem etkem-enkemnı, hodam

Oh, my language! For the first time in my life I prayed God: "Bless my Mother, bless my Father, bless me, save me, oh, my Lord".

Abdulla Tukay

03. Linguistic description

Tatar is a Turkic language of the Kipchak group². The verb comes at the end of the sentence, the language uses postpositions and has no articles¹. Relative clauses come before the noun they modify, and a single word, kul, means both 'hand' and 'arm'¹.

Sources

The 2003 CD had no description of this language: this text was written for the site from the sources below.

WALS Online – Tatar, World Atlas of Language Structures, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013 (v2026).
Glottolog 5.3 – Tatar, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2025.

04. Cartoon

Мультфильм Мактанчык чыпчык на татарском языке
Cartoon · 5 min 36 s · channel: Мультфильмы для детей от студии ТАТАРМУЛЬТФИЛЬМ · YouTube

Video hosted on YouTube and published by the channel shown; its author may remove it at any time.