The Chuvash speak the last survivor of a whole Turkic language branch
Turkic languages split into two main branches, and one of them, Oghuric, now has a single living member: Chuvash, spoken mainly in a Russian republic on the Volga. It sounds so unlike its relatives that scholars once took it for a Turkified Finno-Ugric tongue. UNESCO now lists it as endangered.
The Chuvash are a Turkic people living mostly in Chuvashia and nearby regions of Russia, with communities stretching to Siberia and Central Asia. Most believers are Eastern Orthodox, while minorities follow Islam or Vattisen Yaly, a traditional faith. Their name has two proposed origins: a Turkic word meaning peaceful, or, via regular sound changes traced by Gerard Clauson, Tabghach, the clan that founded China's Northern Wei dynasty.
Their language marks Oghuric's distinctive sound shifts, with r where other Turkic tongues have z and l where they have š. August Ahlqvist's fieldwork in 1856 finally pinned down its family. Because so little survives of its presumed relatives, Volga Bulgar and perhaps Khazar, its exact position is uncertain, and some linguists even suspect it descends from a sister of Proto-Turkic rather than Proto-Turkic itself. Claims of a link to the language of the Huns rest on almost no evidence. Russian, Tatar and Mari have all left heavy marks on it.
Two theories compete on origins: a blend of Sabir tribes and Finno-Ugric peoples, or descent from the Volga Bulgars. After Khazar invasions broke up Old Bulgaria on the Black Sea in the 7th century, Oghuric groups moved to the Volga-Kama region and founded Volga Bulgaria, whose capital became one of the largest cities on Earth. It embraced Islam in the early 10th century, fell to the Mongols in 1236, then passed under the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate.
Russia conquered Kazan in 1552. Burdened with tribute, many Chuvash lost their land and became timber workers or barge haulers, and most converted to Orthodoxy, though full Russification never happened. A cultural revival brought schools and, in 1871, a dedicated alphabet. The Bolsheviks created a Chuvash autonomous region in 1920 and upgraded it to a republic in 1925, but redrew its borders to blunt nationalism and pushed Russification for much of the Soviet era.
Source: Chuvash people
