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You are an unsavable case.Originally Posted by meiliren
"Bulgars" is a name they used for themselves. Foreigners started using it as a reference to them after learning it from actual Bulgars.
And how do you think there were no Bulgars when still many of them use the term, as my quote on page 1 shows? Others differentiate themselves from Russians using Islam as a determinator.
"The present territory of Tatarstan was inhabited by the Volga Bulgars, who settled on the Volga river in the 7th century AD and converted to Islam in 922 during the missionary work of Ahmad ibn Fadlan. After the Mongol invasion, Volga Bulgaria was annexed by the Golden Horde. Most of the population survived, and there may have been a certain degree of mixing between it and the Kipchaks of the Horde during the ensuing period. The group as a whole accepted the exonym "Tatars" (finally in the end of the 19th century; although the name Bulgars persisted in some places; the majority identified themselves simply as the Muslims) and the language of the Kipchaks; on the other hand, the invaders eventually converted to Islam. As the Horde disintegrated in the 15th century, the area became the territory of the Kazan khanate, which was ultimately conquered by Russia in the 16th century.
Some Volga Tatars speak different dialects of Tatar language. Therefore, they form distinct groups such as the Mişär group and the Qasim group. Mişär-Tatars (or Mishars) are a group of Tatars speaking a dialect of the Tatar language. They live in Chelyabinsk, Tambov, Penza, Ryazan, Nizhegorodskaya oblasts of Russia and in Bashkortostan and Mordovia. They lived near and along the Volga River, in Tatarstan. The Western Tatars have their capital in the town of Qasím (Kasimov in Russian transcription) in Ryazan Oblast, with a Tatar population of 1100. A minority of Christianized Volga Tatars are known as Keräşens.
The Volga Tatars used the Turkic Old Tatar language for their literature between the 15th and 19th centuries. It was written in the İske imlâ variant of the Arabic script, but actual spelling varied regionally. The older literary language included a large number of Arabic and Persian loanwords. The modern literary language, however, often uses Russian and other European-derived words instead.
Outside of Tatarstan, urban Tatars usually speak Russian as their first language (in cities such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Tashkent, Almaty, and cities of the Ural and western Siberia) and other languages in a worldwide diaspora.
In the 1910s the Volga Tatars numbered about half a million in the Kazan Governorate in Tatarstan, their historical homeland, about 400,000 in each of the governments of Ufa, 100,000 in Samara and Simbirsk, and about 30,000 in Vyatka, Saratov, Tambov, Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm and Orenburg. An additional 15,000 had migrated to Ryazan or were settled as prisoners in the 16th and 17th centuries in Lithuania (Vilnius, Grodno and Podolia). An additional 2000 resided in St. Petersburg.
Most Kazan Tatars practice Sunni Islam. The Kazan Tatars speak the Tatar language, a Turkic language with a substantial amount of Russian and Arabic loanwords.
Before 1917, polygamy was practiced only by the wealthier classes and was a waning institution.
There is an ethnic nationalist movement among Kazan Tatars that stresses descent from the Bulgars and is known as Bulgarism – there have been graffiti on the walls in the streets of Kazan with phrases such as "Bulgaria is alive" (Булгария жива)
A significant number of Volga Tatars emigrated during the Russian Civil War, mostly to Turkey and Harbin, China. According to the Chinese government, there are still 5,100 Tatars living in Xinjiang province."
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