Tofalars

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Tofalars at the beginning of the 20th century

The Tofalars (own name: Tofa , Tofalar , Russian Тофалары / Tofalary ) are a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in Russia . They are the descendants of the Keten , Mongols and Samoyeds and live in the Irkutsk region , that is, west of Lake Baikal . They were linguistically Turkishised late, in the course of the 17th and 19th centuries. Before that, their ancestors had used one of the neighboring Samoyed languages . Due to their current Turkic language, the Tofalars are assigned to the Siberian Turkic peoples .

Alternative names and religion

The tofalars were also known under the names "Tof", "Tocha" and "Karagassen" ( Russian карагасы / Karagasy ). The neighboring, also Turkic speaking and originally reindeer-keeping Todscha Tuvins to the south emerged from a combination of Tofalars and Tuvinians .

The Tofalars are mostly animists who were (superficially) Christianized by Russian missionaries in the 19th century .

Settlement area and way of life

The Tofalars originally lived as nomadic reindeer herders and hunters in the Sayan Mountains . In the 17th century they were pushed north by Tuvan tribes. In the 1920s and 1930s they were still granted a national Rajon . Today they are considered to be one of the threatened small indigenous peoples of the Russian north, Siberia and the Russian Far East who have come together in the umbrella organization RAIPON since perestroika . In the 1990s, they were characterized by falling life expectancy, high child mortality and a rapid decline in natural population growth; there is also high unemployment. In 2002 the tofalars only comprised around 837 people. Of these, 700 people lived in Nizhneudinsk Raion . The entire Irkutsk Oblast comprised the majority of the ethnic group with 723 people in 2002 . Around half of them (378 people) still spoke the Tofalarian language at that time .

literature

  • Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the world population. Geography - Culture - Society. Nikol Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-933203-84-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ R. Scharf: Demographic change in Siberia. In: Eastern Europe . No. 3, 1995, pp. 267-275.

Web links

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