That confederation was eventually incorporated into the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan unified the various steppe tribes. More recently, however, the term has come to refer more narrowly to related ethnic groups who refer to themselves as Tatars or who speak languages that are commonly referred to as Tatar.
The largest group amongst the Tatars by far are the Volga Tatars , native to the Volga-Ural region Tatarstan and Bashkortostan of European Russia, who for this reason are often also known as "Tatars" in Russian. Their language is known as the Tatar language. As of [update] , there were an estimated 5.
While also speaking languages belonging to different Kipchak sub-groups, genetic studies have shown that the three main groups of Tatars Volga, Crimean , Siberian do not have common ancestors and, thus, their formation occurred independently of one another. However, it is possible that all Tatar groups have at least partially the same origin, mainly from the times of the Golden Horde. From the beginning, the extra r was present in the Western forms and according to the Oxford English Dictionary this was most likely due to an association with Tartarus.
The Persian word is first recorded in the 13th century in reference to the hordes of Genghis Khan and is of unknown origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is "said to be" ultimately from tata.
Ochir states that Siberian Tatars and the Tatars living in the territories between Asia and Europe are of Turkic origin, acquired the appellation Tatar later, and do not possess ancestral connection to the Mongolic Nine Tatars , whose ethnogenesis involved Mongolic people as well as Mongolized Turks who had been ruling over them during the 6β8th centuries.
