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General Information: Endonyms, Ethnographic Groups, Population, and Settlement

In Russian ethnographic tradition, scholars usually classify the Tubalars as Northern Altaians. They have long lived in the basin of the upper reaches of the Biya and the upper reaches of the Ishi. Their traditional areas of residence are the villages of the Maiminsky, Turachaksky, and Choysky districts of the republic. Thus, one can distinguish three ethno-territorial groups of Tubalars, which differ slightly from each other.

In Russia, according to the 2020 All-Russian Population Census, there were 3,675 Tubalar people, including 1,782 men and 1,893 women. In the Altai Republic - 3,476 people, including 1,696 men and 1,780 women.

According to the census of the Russian Empire in 1897, 22 seoks (clans) were identified among the Tubalars, most of which, however, were not Tubalar and emerged as a result of intermarriages of different Altaian groups. These seoks were comparatively numerous (from 200 to 1 thousand people, according to the data of 1897), except for seok Yalan (96 people), most of which were located in the Togul sedentary volost (municipality) along the river Chumysh, the right tributary of the Ob in the steppe region. All of the seoks or their subdivisions under the same names have been known from the Russian historical documents of the first decades of the 17th century, in which they appear as “volosts” or as “zemlitsa” (settlement), and whose inhabitants still live basically in the same places. The data from the Russian historical sources of the 17th century indicates that the names of the volosts of the Tubalars that paid taxes in furs are the self-names of their tribal groups that have survived to this day. The patrilineal seoks of the Tubalars follow the law of exogamy, which forbids representatives of the same seok from marrying. This law is valid for all the Altaians of the modern Altai Republic.

The analysis of various historical and ethnographic data carried out by Leonid Potapov indicates the presence of ancient Turkic ethnic elements in the ethnic composition of the Altai Tubalars. The Turkic ethnonyms were preserved in the names of the seoks of the Altai Tubalars, relating both directly to the ancient Tugu Turki and the Turkic-speaking Tele tribes.

The name of the Tirgesh clan is especially indicative for it is an ethnonym for a large group of the Western Turki of the 6-8th centuries. The Togus and the Chygat clans were also the names of the Turkic-speaking tribes of that time. Ancient Turkic runic inscriptions support the linguistic argument for the similarity of the name of the Tubalar clan Togus with the Toqus Oghuz. Therefore, we can talk not only about the ancient Turkic components in the composition of the Altai Tubalars in general but also about some specific tribes or associations of tribes, the distant historical descendants of which retained their ancient name in some seoks of the modern Tubalars.

The generalized self-name of the Altai Tubalars, “ yysh-kizhi ”, also presents historical interest, for it contains the word “ yysh ”: this is what the ancient Turki called the mountain taiga area. It is found with the same meaning in the Turkic runic writing of the 8th century. The inscriptions dedicated to Kul-Tegin and Tonyukuk mention Otuken yysh, which was the word for the Otuken chern, stretching from the upper reaches of the Selenga to the upper reaches of the Yenisei; Kogmen yysh is the Western Sayan; Altun yish is the Altai; Chugai yysh is the northern slopes of the ancient Inshan ridge, located north of the bend of the Yellow River.

The ancient ethnic substrate which the Tubalars subsequently emerged from turned out to be quite complex. It is marked by the Samoyed ethnic elements mixed with the ancient Turkic ones. This mixture dates back to the early period of the ethnic history of the Tubalars of the Altai. Later, but before they became part of the Russian state, they mixed with the neighboring Teleuts, Teles, Chelkans, and Kumandins. The most numerous seoks and surnames among the Tubalars today are the Komnosh seok (the Tobokovs, Yalbachevs, and Bodroshevs), the Chagat seok (the Bedushevs, Kazagachevs, Chunoshevs, Torbokovs), the Yus seok (the Chekonovs, Voinkovs, Sablashevs), the Togus seok (the Kuchukovs, Taimachevs, Chalbins), the Kuzen seok (the Pakhaevs, Kyzaevs, Kystaevs), the Yaryk seok (the Yudanovs, Yiver and the Yiver clan (the Tarbaganovs, Chibiekovs, Yamanchiraevs, Makoshevs).

Researchers have established that the Tubalars are close to the Southern Altaians, and the existing dissimilarity in the economic and cultural type stems from a significant difference in their habitat. Unlike the Southern Altaians, who entered into allegiance to the Russian Empire in 1756, the Kumandins, Tubalars, and Chelkans of the northern Altai had become subjects of the Russian state much earlier: by the end of the 17th century, over a hundred of their volosts, uluses, and ails had been paying the yasak (the fur tax.) During the Soviet industrialization, the seizure of land and the liquidation of the so-called “unpromising” villages in the 1960s–80s led to the disappearance of the resources that supported the ethnocultural identity of the group. Furthermore, the damage to the traditional culture resulted in depopulation. For example, there are seven rural settlements with 21 localities in the modern Choysky district. Total population of the region is just over eight thousand people.

The dominant trend in the life of the modern Tubalars is the ongoing linguistic and ethnocultural assimilation. The least number of indigenous peoples (the Kumandins, Telengits, Tubalars, Chelkans, and Shors) reside in the northern districts of the republic, the Maiminsky, Choysky, and Turochaksky, respectively (8.16%, 8.65% and 19.34% of the total population).

SETTLEMENT: Tubalars, like other representatives of the indigenous population of the Altai Republic, live mainly in the territory of traditional residence. At the same time, compared to the 2010 census, the territory of their settlement has expanded significantly. At a minimum, according to the 2020 сensus, two hundred Tubalar people permanently reside in the territories of most regions of Russia. A significant part of those involved in labor “commuting” migration, according to empirical data, work on a rotational basis in the regions of the north of Western Siberia and the Far East.