Mishar Tatar dialect


Mishar Tatar or Misher Tatar, also Western Tatar, is a dialect of Tatar spoken by Mishar Tatars mainly located at Penza, Ulyanovsk, Orenburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Volgograd, Saratov oblasts of Russia and in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Mordovia of Russian Federation and Finland.
Some linguists think that Mishar Tatar belongs to the Kypchak-Cuman group of languages rather than to the Kypchak-Bulgar group.
This is the dialect spoken by the Tatar minority of Finland. The origins of the Tatar community living in Finland rest upon the merchants coming from the Volga-Ural region of Russia in the 1860s and most of the people in this community came from Sergach Mishar Tatar villages in the province of Nizhny Novgorod. The success of the first Tatar migrations caused other villagers to migrate to Finland.

Dialects

Mishar Tatar dialects are according to Makhmutova two or according to Gabdulkhay Akhatov three groups.
In the Western dialect Ç is pronounced and as . C is pronounced. There are no differences between v and w, q and k, g and ğ in the Mişär dialect. The Cyrillic alphabet doesn't have special letters for q, ğ and w, so Mişär speakers have no difficulty reading Tatar written in Cyrillic.
Classification of Mishar Tatar dialects: